Zarqawi’s death is giving a much needed boost to the media appearances of the terrorist experts who for three years have been consistently wrong about Zarqawi’s life. Because Zarqawi' convict-lawyer genius for gimcrack publicity coincided with the American military's need for a scapegoat (since in Iraq, unlike Vietnam, they can't really conjure up big, scary HQs just across the border in Cambodia, brimming with VC -- thus they have to make due with a reject from the Jordanian prison system), the Washington Post analysis (a thing of such breathlessness that it gives LI a nostalgic twinge – it sounds ever so Mission Accomplished, a flashback to 2003) written by Craig Whitlock rolls out sentences like these: “The death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi could mark a turning point for al-Qaeda and the global jihadist movement, according to terrorism analysts and intelligence officials.”
The error in Whitlock’s logic is given to us by any fairy tale: you don’t have to be a giant to be a giant killer. That the U.S. failed to take Zaqawi seriously, except as a propaganda excuse to link together Saddam Hussein and OBL, and then found him impossible to capture or to counter has more to do with the incredibly bad occupation planning by the our tenured and very senile War Minister than any particular genius of Zarqawi, who I’d rank up there with Clyde Barrow, but not, certainly not, Osama bin Laden.
Other self satirizing sentences from Whitlock:
“He was also a master media strategist, using the Internet to post videotaped beheadings of hostages and assert responsibility for some of Iraq's deadliest suicide attacks, usually in the name of al-Qaeda.”
“Zarqawi gave a boost to the al-Qaeda network by giving it a highly visible presence in Iraq at a time when its original leaders went into hiding or were killed after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.”
And this one is particularly good: “But whoever succeeds him will be hard-pressed to achieve the same level of notoriety or to unite the foreign fighters in Iraq under a single command, analysts said.”
Actually, notoriety seems pathetically easy to achieve in Iraq. Since there is no security to speak of, except in the Green zone, the dullest nitwit can purchase a police uniform and weapons, which are more available than electricity or water, stop the random car filled with foreigners, snatch them after a firefight, and behead them on camera in one's own good time. Russian embassy officials, journalists (who are fewer on the ground all of the time), engineers, etc., etc. The constant stream of war mongers going to Iraq to proclaim how wonderful things are are not so deceived by their own lies that they are going to make the experiment. I wish they would. Mark Steyn, in 2003, made a very touted tour of Iraq in a car, and suffered no injury. LI wishes he’d try the same stunt again, just to see if there are any deadenders out there. He can take Presidential aide Zinsmeister with him, and they can pull up at suitable stops in Ramadi and Mosul and read Zinsmeisters definitive essay, The War Is Over and We Won, to adoring crowds.
But here’s the reality: after three years of occupation, the occupying forces have failed to such a deep extent that even Basra has now become murder city. When I talk to people about the war, even those violently opposed to it, I often hear: but we now have a moral obligation to Iraq to stay. This, of course, drives me mad. It is like saying that some drunk and crazy doctor has a moral obligation to stay with the patient he has butchered -- perhaps this time, he'll pull out just the right organ with his trusty scalpel. No and no and no, our moral obligation is to do no more harm. There's no point in trying to repair harm already inflicted, but we can and should withdraw now. Withdraw at the end of 2005/2004/2003. Ah, but the brainless monster lurches on, for the movie must end with the peasants, torches in hand, burning him out.
I imagine the drones will buzz and buzz about Zarqawi for another week or so. Much better to have headlines about our miraculously intelligent forces offing a man who was apparently in such bad odor with the insurgency itself that he was no longer safe in Anbar province than to have headlines about, say, the recent announcement of the Iraqi government that 6,000 murdered people in the last six months in Baghdad have been processed through the city’s morgue (which probably understates the number of the dead).
As LI pointed out in 2004, we have already reached the turning point in Iraq: the return of Sistani to Najaf. It is at that point that the Americans essentially became irrelevant, except as a sort of praetorian guard of ethnic cleansing -- a bigger, better equipped militia.
Now it is all turning points -- because we are going around in a complete and flawless circle, one fuckup feeding into the next.
PS – My comparison of the Americans in Iraq to a mad, drunken surgeon may have been too harsh … to mad, drunken surgeons. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon quietly announced that private contractors have the right to bag Iraqis any time, way, or place they feel like it – oops! I mean, they announced that after a solemn weighing of the incident in question, given the gravity of the situation, and factoring in the necessity to fight terrorism in the long, long war, no action is going to be taken against the Aegis contractors who were filmed firing at random Iraqi vehicles in a video that was then put on the internet, to a improv sound track of Elvis Presley’s Mystery Train (although the department did warn that future videos showing mercenaries massacring Iraqis will be investigated if they violate copyright law again – you just can’t rip off Elvis Presley’s estate, you know!)
We particularly liked this graf:
“No security contractor has been prosecuted for such incidents, in part because of an agreement forged soon after the U.S. invasion in 2003 that made it impossible for the Iraqi government to prosecute contract workers. While several contractors have been relieved of their duties for shooting without cause, actions taken against contractors are generally carried out quietly and rarely, if ever, disclosed.”
Forged is good. Forged doesn’t tell us who the forgers were, or who the forged were, -- but we sure know who the fucked are, in this case – those corpses that aren’t wearing blue suede shoes. Nothing but dead hounddogs here, boss!
Saturday, June 10, 2006
Thursday, June 08, 2006
beinart
It had been a phobia of his for years that someday he would fall into the hands of madmen—in particular, madmen who seemed sane up until the last moment. – Philip Dick
LI knows exactly what Dick is talking about. Or perhaps I should say – America in general knows exactly what Dick is talking about. Except – do we? Do we, Walt-Whitman-Alan-Ginsburg-Muddy-Waters' America? Case in point is Peter Beinart’s The Good Fight. We ignored the excerpt in the NYT magazine, but we knew it wasn’t going to go away.
Beinart has taken a page and a phrase from the Weekly Standard, and issued a call for a liberal foreign policy of ‘American greatness.’ To make his case, he unfolds a narrative of stalwart cold war liberalism – Truman, Kennedy and (not mentioned in the TPM post, but surely a presence) Henry Jackson. Beinart proposes to be our modern Kennan. Kennan’s memo about Russia gave an intellectual blessing to Truman’s anti-communist/security state program. Out of that fountainhead issued the CIA, the expanded and never contracted Pentagon, SAC, the interventions starting in Greece and ending in Angola, etc., etc. Beinart correctly sees that this liberalism had a double face, with the domestic side using foreign policy as an excuse (or, I suppose Beinart would say, as a platform) for expanding the role of government in the economy, gradually forcing the governing class to expand civil rights, and construct a welfare society. Beinart does like to lard his punditry with the kind of prophetic vistas that real estate salesmen selling houses near paper mills put in their pitches.
“In the liberal vision, it is precisely our recognition that we are not angels that makes us exceptional. Because we recognize that we can be corrupted by unlimited power, we accept the restraints that empires refuse. That is why the Truman administration self-consciously shared power with America’s democratic allies, although we comprised one half of the world’s GDP and they were on their knees.
Moral humility breeds international restraint. That restraint ensures that weaker countries welcome our preeminence, and thus, that our preeminence endures. It makes us a great nation, not a predatory one. At home, because America realizes that it does not embody goodness, it does not grow complacent. Rather than viewing American democracy as a settled accomplishment to which others aspire, we see ourselves as engaged in our own democratic struggle, which parallels the one we support abroad. It was not the celebration of American democracy that inspired the world in the 1950s and 1960s, but America’s wrenching efforts—against McCarthyism and segregation—to give our democracy new meaning. Then, as now, the threat to national greatness stems not from self- doubt, but from self- satisfaction.”
Beinart realizes that this vision isn’t shared by all liberals – in fact, it is increasingly scoffed at – and responds to that scoffing much like Mildred Pierce finally owning up to the moral flaws of her daughter:
“This vision has sometimes divided liberals themselves. Recognizing American fallibility means recognizing that the United States cannot wield power while remaining pure. From Henry Wallace in the late 1940s to Michael Moore after September 11, some liberals have preferred inaction to the tragic reality that America must shed its moral innocence to act meaningfully in the world.”
America shedding its moral innocence is a phrase that Mencken would certainly have loved – it concentrates, in one butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth phrase, a flabbiness of vision so comprehensive that one could run a think tank on it for a year.
For good and ill, America has never been morally innocent. The unjustified transfer of the qualities of a human being to a nation can insensibly lead to the idea that nations are also, at one time, babies. But nations are at no time babies. Nations are conceived in fire and blood, and they would not survive for a day if they were not so designed that they served the interests of the most powerful class within them. Rather than innocence, America suffers most from moral ignorance –from an inability to deduce, from the chain of actions that constitute its history with other nations, the co-extensive tendencies and structures that have been built up inside this country. If I continually find myself with a hangover on waking up in the morning, I should, as a rational person, deduce that I have a tendency to drink too much – and not that I think so much about virtue and God that my brain hurts.
Unfortunately, in the twentieth century, the culture and political economy of war has become so strong in America that the country has a hard time shedding it even when, as now, it has become counter-productive. Beinart’s problem actually is in seeing that war has a price – even wars that are won have a price that they exact from the victor nation. That is what makes the phrase ‘good war’ so satanic – it attaches people to war under false pretenses. While it might be good to win a war, it is never good to wage one – it is, at best, necessary. But when you have promoted the habit of war, both by grossly inflating the war related economy within your country and by childishly refusing to examine your country’s interests in the context of military conflict –substituting rhetoric about national greatness for the reality of the compromises between justice and economic and political interests that must determine any nation’s foreign policy – you have ceased to analyze at all. You have started to maunder.
In his response to Beinart, Max Sawiky takes out a sawed off shotgun and puts a load of double ought in the quivering jello of the national greatness thing. Myself, I wish only to indicate that Beinart's argument is part of a larger argument that is not being joined. The larger argument is that the Cold War is not a model, but a deleterious compulsion to which the elite go back because they have lost their sense for alternatives. In fact, the thing America needs to do least, at the moment, is hold fast in the long war against ‘jihadist totalitarianism’ – Beinart’s comic phrase for the barely controlled anarchy that has, so far, infested only one state that we know of, Afghanistan during the 90s. Unless he is subtly suggesting we should sneak attack Saudi Arabia. That we should orient our whole foreign policy to preventing other Afghanistans is perhaps the dumbest thing he suggests – it competes with the inability, at least in the excerpts, to recognize that the Cold War mentality actually vitiated America’s war against Osama bin Laden, since that war was fought, as it were, absent-mindedly – while the troops were closing in on Tora Bora, the commander, in Tampa, and the Secretary of War, in D.C., were dreaming of Iraq. And so the best of all possible worlds was formed, by accident and intention – Osama escapes, terrorism is on tap, and the ‘jihadist threat’ can be pulled out of a hat anytime to justify more military malarkey. It really is a minor threat, but, frustratingly, the last people who will treat it as a threat are the same people who continually tell us it is a major threat. They treat Al Qaeda the way the producers of Friday the 13th treated Freddie Krueger – as a dependable monster generating an infinite amount of sequels.
Beinart’s history – his idea that we should revive cold war liberalism now, rolling out the references to Truman, to Kennedy, to the Missile Crisis, etc., – reminds me of what Gibbon said about Constantine’s arch. Constantine, to celebrate himself and his new capital city, demanded a triumphant monument. But there was a small problem in building one from scratch:
“To revive the genius of Phidias and Lysippus, surpassed indeed the power of a Roman emperor; but the immortal productions which they had bequeathed to posterity were exposed without defence to the rapacious vanity of a despot. By his commands the cities of Greece and Asia were despoiled of their most valuable ornaments.The trophies of memorable wars, the objects of religious veneration, the most finished statues of the gods and heroes, of the sages and poets, of ancient times, contributed to the splendid triumph of Constantinople; and gave occasion to the remark of the historian Cedrenus, who observes, with some enthusiasm, that nothing seemed wanting except the souls of the illustrious men whom these admirable monuments were intended to represent. But it is not in the city of Constantine, nor in the declining period of an empire, when the human mind was depressed by civil and religious slavery, that we should seek for the souls of Homer and of Demosthenes.”
Depressed by the civil and religious slavery of the Bush era, I don’t think we should seek for the souls of FDR and John Kennedy in the bodies of Hilary Clinton and Joe Liberman.
LI knows exactly what Dick is talking about. Or perhaps I should say – America in general knows exactly what Dick is talking about. Except – do we? Do we, Walt-Whitman-Alan-Ginsburg-Muddy-Waters' America? Case in point is Peter Beinart’s The Good Fight. We ignored the excerpt in the NYT magazine, but we knew it wasn’t going to go away.
Beinart has taken a page and a phrase from the Weekly Standard, and issued a call for a liberal foreign policy of ‘American greatness.’ To make his case, he unfolds a narrative of stalwart cold war liberalism – Truman, Kennedy and (not mentioned in the TPM post, but surely a presence) Henry Jackson. Beinart proposes to be our modern Kennan. Kennan’s memo about Russia gave an intellectual blessing to Truman’s anti-communist/security state program. Out of that fountainhead issued the CIA, the expanded and never contracted Pentagon, SAC, the interventions starting in Greece and ending in Angola, etc., etc. Beinart correctly sees that this liberalism had a double face, with the domestic side using foreign policy as an excuse (or, I suppose Beinart would say, as a platform) for expanding the role of government in the economy, gradually forcing the governing class to expand civil rights, and construct a welfare society. Beinart does like to lard his punditry with the kind of prophetic vistas that real estate salesmen selling houses near paper mills put in their pitches.
“In the liberal vision, it is precisely our recognition that we are not angels that makes us exceptional. Because we recognize that we can be corrupted by unlimited power, we accept the restraints that empires refuse. That is why the Truman administration self-consciously shared power with America’s democratic allies, although we comprised one half of the world’s GDP and they were on their knees.
Moral humility breeds international restraint. That restraint ensures that weaker countries welcome our preeminence, and thus, that our preeminence endures. It makes us a great nation, not a predatory one. At home, because America realizes that it does not embody goodness, it does not grow complacent. Rather than viewing American democracy as a settled accomplishment to which others aspire, we see ourselves as engaged in our own democratic struggle, which parallels the one we support abroad. It was not the celebration of American democracy that inspired the world in the 1950s and 1960s, but America’s wrenching efforts—against McCarthyism and segregation—to give our democracy new meaning. Then, as now, the threat to national greatness stems not from self- doubt, but from self- satisfaction.”
Beinart realizes that this vision isn’t shared by all liberals – in fact, it is increasingly scoffed at – and responds to that scoffing much like Mildred Pierce finally owning up to the moral flaws of her daughter:
“This vision has sometimes divided liberals themselves. Recognizing American fallibility means recognizing that the United States cannot wield power while remaining pure. From Henry Wallace in the late 1940s to Michael Moore after September 11, some liberals have preferred inaction to the tragic reality that America must shed its moral innocence to act meaningfully in the world.”
America shedding its moral innocence is a phrase that Mencken would certainly have loved – it concentrates, in one butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth phrase, a flabbiness of vision so comprehensive that one could run a think tank on it for a year.
For good and ill, America has never been morally innocent. The unjustified transfer of the qualities of a human being to a nation can insensibly lead to the idea that nations are also, at one time, babies. But nations are at no time babies. Nations are conceived in fire and blood, and they would not survive for a day if they were not so designed that they served the interests of the most powerful class within them. Rather than innocence, America suffers most from moral ignorance –from an inability to deduce, from the chain of actions that constitute its history with other nations, the co-extensive tendencies and structures that have been built up inside this country. If I continually find myself with a hangover on waking up in the morning, I should, as a rational person, deduce that I have a tendency to drink too much – and not that I think so much about virtue and God that my brain hurts.
Unfortunately, in the twentieth century, the culture and political economy of war has become so strong in America that the country has a hard time shedding it even when, as now, it has become counter-productive. Beinart’s problem actually is in seeing that war has a price – even wars that are won have a price that they exact from the victor nation. That is what makes the phrase ‘good war’ so satanic – it attaches people to war under false pretenses. While it might be good to win a war, it is never good to wage one – it is, at best, necessary. But when you have promoted the habit of war, both by grossly inflating the war related economy within your country and by childishly refusing to examine your country’s interests in the context of military conflict –substituting rhetoric about national greatness for the reality of the compromises between justice and economic and political interests that must determine any nation’s foreign policy – you have ceased to analyze at all. You have started to maunder.
In his response to Beinart, Max Sawiky takes out a sawed off shotgun and puts a load of double ought in the quivering jello of the national greatness thing. Myself, I wish only to indicate that Beinart's argument is part of a larger argument that is not being joined. The larger argument is that the Cold War is not a model, but a deleterious compulsion to which the elite go back because they have lost their sense for alternatives. In fact, the thing America needs to do least, at the moment, is hold fast in the long war against ‘jihadist totalitarianism’ – Beinart’s comic phrase for the barely controlled anarchy that has, so far, infested only one state that we know of, Afghanistan during the 90s. Unless he is subtly suggesting we should sneak attack Saudi Arabia. That we should orient our whole foreign policy to preventing other Afghanistans is perhaps the dumbest thing he suggests – it competes with the inability, at least in the excerpts, to recognize that the Cold War mentality actually vitiated America’s war against Osama bin Laden, since that war was fought, as it were, absent-mindedly – while the troops were closing in on Tora Bora, the commander, in Tampa, and the Secretary of War, in D.C., were dreaming of Iraq. And so the best of all possible worlds was formed, by accident and intention – Osama escapes, terrorism is on tap, and the ‘jihadist threat’ can be pulled out of a hat anytime to justify more military malarkey. It really is a minor threat, but, frustratingly, the last people who will treat it as a threat are the same people who continually tell us it is a major threat. They treat Al Qaeda the way the producers of Friday the 13th treated Freddie Krueger – as a dependable monster generating an infinite amount of sequels.
Beinart’s history – his idea that we should revive cold war liberalism now, rolling out the references to Truman, to Kennedy, to the Missile Crisis, etc., – reminds me of what Gibbon said about Constantine’s arch. Constantine, to celebrate himself and his new capital city, demanded a triumphant monument. But there was a small problem in building one from scratch:
“To revive the genius of Phidias and Lysippus, surpassed indeed the power of a Roman emperor; but the immortal productions which they had bequeathed to posterity were exposed without defence to the rapacious vanity of a despot. By his commands the cities of Greece and Asia were despoiled of their most valuable ornaments.The trophies of memorable wars, the objects of religious veneration, the most finished statues of the gods and heroes, of the sages and poets, of ancient times, contributed to the splendid triumph of Constantinople; and gave occasion to the remark of the historian Cedrenus, who observes, with some enthusiasm, that nothing seemed wanting except the souls of the illustrious men whom these admirable monuments were intended to represent. But it is not in the city of Constantine, nor in the declining period of an empire, when the human mind was depressed by civil and religious slavery, that we should seek for the souls of Homer and of Demosthenes.”
Depressed by the civil and religious slavery of the Bush era, I don’t think we should seek for the souls of FDR and John Kennedy in the bodies of Hilary Clinton and Joe Liberman.
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
just like king Nebuchnezzar's blues
Well, LI is on a tight schedule due to work this week. So we are going to have to be uncharacteristically close mouthed. We do recommend the Peter Popham article about Venice – since, obviously, the aim of this site is to highlight every fucking depressing fact we can cull from the World disaster and howl before it – or at least low, like Nebuchnezzar among the grass blades.
“The only practicable way to keep out the high tides, engineers decided, was to have gates fixed to the lagoon floor that would hinge upwards to close it off to at times of emergency. And so the Moses scheme was drawn up, envisaging 78 massive gates, each 28m wide and 18m long, fixed to the lagoon floor.
The politicians then sat down and chewed the idea over. For the best part of 30 years. There were a hundred different views on the project, and the damage it could do. It wouldn't work at all. It would cause the lagoon to fill with stagnant water, it would kill of the lagoon's ecological diversity. It was a scam by capitalist corporations to make a killing at the city's expense. Governments in Rome came and went - at the rate of about two per year - without taking the difficult decision.
Finally, three years ago, then Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi cried "Basta!" and set the project in motion. The first stone, bearing his name and ceremonially set in place by him, is now at the bottom of the lagoon.”
Popham gives his undivided support to this project to save Venice. Things are bad in several ways in Venice. For instance, the population in the city of Venice proper is at the lowest point since –well, the 13th century? Unfortunately, the object of ire in Popham’s article, the new mayor of Venice and his opposition to Moses, isn’t properly described – he is only decried. Popham concedes that 20th century ‘improvements’ have played havoc with Venice:
“The man-made Venice Lagoon has three inlets from the sea. The industrialisation of the lagoon during the 20th century, the destruction of sand banks and their replacement by concrete ones, and the digging of canals to allow big ships to enter, have made the lagoon far more vulnerable to floods, experts say. Conditions inside and outside are today more or less the same.”
However, he seems to view the Moses project as unquestionable. We wonder. We do think that John Kay’s proposal that Venice be turned over to Disney – much as Times Square, at least in spirit, has been – must be making Ruskin turn over in his grave. This is the way the world ends/not with a bang but with Goofy, Pocahontas and the Lion King. As Eliot might have said – although, stuffing his pockets with cash from Cats, who know what he would have really said.
“The only practicable way to keep out the high tides, engineers decided, was to have gates fixed to the lagoon floor that would hinge upwards to close it off to at times of emergency. And so the Moses scheme was drawn up, envisaging 78 massive gates, each 28m wide and 18m long, fixed to the lagoon floor.
The politicians then sat down and chewed the idea over. For the best part of 30 years. There were a hundred different views on the project, and the damage it could do. It wouldn't work at all. It would cause the lagoon to fill with stagnant water, it would kill of the lagoon's ecological diversity. It was a scam by capitalist corporations to make a killing at the city's expense. Governments in Rome came and went - at the rate of about two per year - without taking the difficult decision.
Finally, three years ago, then Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi cried "Basta!" and set the project in motion. The first stone, bearing his name and ceremonially set in place by him, is now at the bottom of the lagoon.”
Popham gives his undivided support to this project to save Venice. Things are bad in several ways in Venice. For instance, the population in the city of Venice proper is at the lowest point since –well, the 13th century? Unfortunately, the object of ire in Popham’s article, the new mayor of Venice and his opposition to Moses, isn’t properly described – he is only decried. Popham concedes that 20th century ‘improvements’ have played havoc with Venice:
“The man-made Venice Lagoon has three inlets from the sea. The industrialisation of the lagoon during the 20th century, the destruction of sand banks and their replacement by concrete ones, and the digging of canals to allow big ships to enter, have made the lagoon far more vulnerable to floods, experts say. Conditions inside and outside are today more or less the same.”
However, he seems to view the Moses project as unquestionable. We wonder. We do think that John Kay’s proposal that Venice be turned over to Disney – much as Times Square, at least in spirit, has been – must be making Ruskin turn over in his grave. This is the way the world ends/not with a bang but with Goofy, Pocahontas and the Lion King. As Eliot might have said – although, stuffing his pockets with cash from Cats, who know what he would have really said.
Monday, June 05, 2006
the sycophant's dilemma
No American writer would have fit as easily into court society – whether in Idi Amin’s Kampala or in Caesar Borgia’s Rome – as Fred Barnes. The man is not just your average D.C. ass kisser. He is somehow beyond that. He is to flattery what de Sade was to cruelty: there is a sexual relish in his praises of our present Commander in Chief that was embodied by that wonderful crotch shot pic on the cover of his last book, Rebel in Chief. Latent homoeroticism be damned – the sexual excitements of other people are, of course, sealed by seals even the angels in Revelations can't unlock, but obviously the zipper of our Rebel in Chief and the sacred object found behind it fills Barnes with an eagerness, a reverence that he has as much difficulty mastering as I have comprehending. But there it is, unabashed, unashamed. His career of abasement before right wing thugs (two thumbs up, Benito Mussolini!) has created a prose style that is the equivalent of a dog wagging its tail while it begs for a biscuit, except that dogs have constraints built into their body talk from which Barnes, who is rumored to be human, is free, using as he often does something like language.
Which is all by way of recommending Barnes’ article on Jeb Bush in the Weekly Standard. In it, Barnes has created a new philosophical conundrum: the sycophant’s dilemma. It is a variant of the Buridan's ass problem. You remember, there are two equally delicious piles of hay put before an ass, one on the right, one on the left. Which will the ass prefer, and why? In Barne’s version of the conundrum, we have two male, oh so testosteroni, oh so rockstar, squeezingly male Bushes put before the ravished eyes of our groupie. Now, which shall receive the higher praise? Is it to be our Rebel in Chief – so precious, so manly, so mission is accomplished? Or is it the leaner, meaner Jeb? So Christian that one remembers the sexy pictures of Jesus from Sunday School, so cut the government and cut taxes that one can almost imagine him stepping over the starved and dessicated bodies of poor people (but then, Rebel in Chief one ups him – for who has done more to kill off poor people than our Katrina Kommando!). So you can see, Barnes is in a sexual stew:
“Friends of Jeb compare him favorably with his brother, but they're wary of doing it on the record. One former Republican governor insisted that Jeb Bush "is far more gifted than his brother or his father," the elder President Bush. A consultant who knows both Jeb and George says, "Jeb is excellent and George is above average."
The conventional wisdom is that Jeb is the smart one who thinks through issues, and George is merely savvy and acts on instinct. That's a media myth. Both think alot before they act. And they agree on many things. JebBush has visited Iraq and backs the policy there. He agrees with his brother on immigration and taxes and soon.
But there are significant differences, so many that conservative activist Grover Norquist says, "Jeb Bush is adopted." There's no "genetic mix" with his father or his brother, according to Norquist. He is joking, of course, to highlight the ideological gap between Jeb and the Bush family. Jeb Bush is a small government conservative. He was feted in Washington in 2003 by the libertarian Cato Institute and talks about having a "libertarian gene." President Bush has no such gene. He's what I call a strong government conservative and others refer to as a big government conservative. True, President Bush is closer ideologically to President Reagan than to his father, a moderate. But Jeb Bush is closer to Reagan than his brother is.”
Delight and anguish deliciously mix here in much the same way they mixed in the soul of Humbert Humbert, bringing bad domestic news to his step daughter, Lo.
Here are other Barnesisms from the article:
“But Jeb Bush has turned out to be the superior governor of the two. He's the most powerful chief executive in Florida in modern times and has had a positive impact on the state in almost every conceivable way--economically, fiscally, educationally, politically, and the list could go on and on.”
“In this state, he is the guy," House Democratic leader Dan Gelber told Wil S. Hylton of GQ magazine. "Everybody else is not even in the ballpark. He's a rock star."”
“Bush, after handling eight hurricanes and four tropical storms in 14 months in 2004 and 2005, has become the undisputed national leader in emergency management.”
“…his command of the intricacies of policy … a hands-on governor, Bush is a workaholic…he learned how to project his charm and likability …He's not only a limited government conservative, but a social and religious conservative as well…”
The list could go on and on... LI has read Penthouse Letters that are less heated. (In fact, we did an article, years ago, about erotica writers, and mostly they were a glum crew. But somehow I think Barnes' loves his fantasies even in his off hours). It is, in its own perverse, disgusting way, inspiring. While I’d say that the last five years of Bush culture have rank up there with the last five years of Ceauşescu’s rule for tawdry failure, corruption, and an indictment of the country’s civilization as a whole, it is a little cheering to know that one man, getting to share body space in the same room, sometimes, some record-it-in-your-pillow-diary-times, with the Rebel in Chief (oh, and he shook my hand. I will never wash this hand again! Ever! I swear it diary.) is living his dream life, shuttling between Bush brothers. These are the best years of Fred Barnes' life, make no mistake about it. That he is a prominent media personality, on TV whenever he wants to be, is the sad thing – his dream life being our national nightmare and all, you know.
Which is all by way of recommending Barnes’ article on Jeb Bush in the Weekly Standard. In it, Barnes has created a new philosophical conundrum: the sycophant’s dilemma. It is a variant of the Buridan's ass problem. You remember, there are two equally delicious piles of hay put before an ass, one on the right, one on the left. Which will the ass prefer, and why? In Barne’s version of the conundrum, we have two male, oh so testosteroni, oh so rockstar, squeezingly male Bushes put before the ravished eyes of our groupie. Now, which shall receive the higher praise? Is it to be our Rebel in Chief – so precious, so manly, so mission is accomplished? Or is it the leaner, meaner Jeb? So Christian that one remembers the sexy pictures of Jesus from Sunday School, so cut the government and cut taxes that one can almost imagine him stepping over the starved and dessicated bodies of poor people (but then, Rebel in Chief one ups him – for who has done more to kill off poor people than our Katrina Kommando!). So you can see, Barnes is in a sexual stew:
“Friends of Jeb compare him favorably with his brother, but they're wary of doing it on the record. One former Republican governor insisted that Jeb Bush "is far more gifted than his brother or his father," the elder President Bush. A consultant who knows both Jeb and George says, "Jeb is excellent and George is above average."
The conventional wisdom is that Jeb is the smart one who thinks through issues, and George is merely savvy and acts on instinct. That's a media myth. Both think alot before they act. And they agree on many things. JebBush has visited Iraq and backs the policy there. He agrees with his brother on immigration and taxes and soon.
But there are significant differences, so many that conservative activist Grover Norquist says, "Jeb Bush is adopted." There's no "genetic mix" with his father or his brother, according to Norquist. He is joking, of course, to highlight the ideological gap between Jeb and the Bush family. Jeb Bush is a small government conservative. He was feted in Washington in 2003 by the libertarian Cato Institute and talks about having a "libertarian gene." President Bush has no such gene. He's what I call a strong government conservative and others refer to as a big government conservative. True, President Bush is closer ideologically to President Reagan than to his father, a moderate. But Jeb Bush is closer to Reagan than his brother is.”
Delight and anguish deliciously mix here in much the same way they mixed in the soul of Humbert Humbert, bringing bad domestic news to his step daughter, Lo.
Here are other Barnesisms from the article:
“But Jeb Bush has turned out to be the superior governor of the two. He's the most powerful chief executive in Florida in modern times and has had a positive impact on the state in almost every conceivable way--economically, fiscally, educationally, politically, and the list could go on and on.”
“In this state, he is the guy," House Democratic leader Dan Gelber told Wil S. Hylton of GQ magazine. "Everybody else is not even in the ballpark. He's a rock star."”
“Bush, after handling eight hurricanes and four tropical storms in 14 months in 2004 and 2005, has become the undisputed national leader in emergency management.”
“…his command of the intricacies of policy … a hands-on governor, Bush is a workaholic…he learned how to project his charm and likability …He's not only a limited government conservative, but a social and religious conservative as well…”
The list could go on and on... LI has read Penthouse Letters that are less heated. (In fact, we did an article, years ago, about erotica writers, and mostly they were a glum crew. But somehow I think Barnes' loves his fantasies even in his off hours). It is, in its own perverse, disgusting way, inspiring. While I’d say that the last five years of Bush culture have rank up there with the last five years of Ceauşescu’s rule for tawdry failure, corruption, and an indictment of the country’s civilization as a whole, it is a little cheering to know that one man, getting to share body space in the same room, sometimes, some record-it-in-your-pillow-diary-times, with the Rebel in Chief (oh, and he shook my hand. I will never wash this hand again! Ever! I swear it diary.) is living his dream life, shuttling between Bush brothers. These are the best years of Fred Barnes' life, make no mistake about it. That he is a prominent media personality, on TV whenever he wants to be, is the sad thing – his dream life being our national nightmare and all, you know.
Sunday, June 04, 2006
other great american massacres we can compare haditha to
World War II has certainly been turned into the strangest referent. Like Baptists figuring out where they stand on witches by looking at Leviticus, the war party feels better if they can invoke, in the most ridiculous ways, WWII.
Recently, Bill O’Reilly tried to justify Haditha by referring to Americans slaughtering Nazis at Malmedy. He had that a bit wrong – it was the Nazis who were slaughtering the Americans. The tonier purlieus of the WAPO op ed page shows how to right the big Fox guy’s blunder, publishing a heartwarming tale by the father of a GI, Frank Schaeffer. Schaeffer comes out of the gate a bit ahead of O’Reilly: for instance, he claims to have read a book. The book is Norman Lewis’ Naples ’44. This is a book that is foreign to the O'reilly fan base. In this book, there are no Clancy like descriptions of the latest secret American weaponry; there are no muscular Navy Seals; and there is no obligatory sex scene – by which I mean using high tech weaponry to blow suitable enemies limb from limb, while hopefully maintaining the level of pain along their nervous system for as long as possible. Thus, we can differentiate between the audience of B.R. and the audience of Schaeffer. I would call Schaeffer’s audience the decent. The centrists. The muscular liberals.
Schaeffer quotes the following passage from Lewis' book:
“"I saw an ugly sight: a British officer interrogating a civilian, and repeatedly hitting him about the head with the chair; treatment which the [civilian], his face a mask of blood, suffered with stoicism. At the end of the interrogation, which had not been considered successful, the officer called on a private and asked him in a pleasant, conversational sort of manner, 'Would you like to take this man away, and shoot him?' The private's reply was to spit on his hands, and say, 'I don't mind if I do, sir.'
"I received confirmation . . . that American combat units were ordered by their officers to beat to death [those] who attempted to surrender to them. These men seem very naive and childlike, but some of them are beginning to question the ethics of this order.
"We liberated them from the Fascist Monster. And what is the prize? The rebirth of democracy. The glorious prospect of being able one day to choose their rulers from a list of powerful men, most of whose corruptions are generally known and accepted with weary resignation. The days of Mussolini must seem like a lost paradise compared to us."
Luckily, though, we know that all came right in the end. For why was the U.S. in WWII? To selflessly bring democracy to Italy and Germany. And Japan. That Italy was ruled for fifty years by the same party, or that the U.S. spent large sums to make sure that this was the case, which might be called bribery, treachery, and non-democratic, is one of those penny ante lefty objections.
“Judging by Lewis's diary -- and many other accounts -- the so-called Greatest Generation of World War II was often badly led and worse-behaved, and was certainly less merciful than our present-day soldiers and their leaders. We haven't carpet-bombed Baghdad or nuked Fallujah to spare the lives of our troops. Yet most Americans are glad we forced Italy, Germany and Japan to become democracies, however brutal our means.”
Yet one wonders – how about the marvelous massacres of other U.S. wars? Surely Schaeffer should dig down and find other great things the Great Spirit has led Americans to do. I’d recommend the Sand River Massacre. There, now, was a massacre. Men women and children. But who can doubt that we had the best interests of the American Indians at heart? We were only trying to force them to join a democracy, however brutal the means.
Here’s an account of it:
"The attack was initially reported in the press as a victory against a bravely-fought opponent. Within weeks, however, eyewitnesses came forward offering conflicting testimony, leading to a military investigation and two Congressional investigations into the events.
Starting in the late 1850's, the gold rush in the Rocky Mountains, then part of the western Kansas Territory, had brought a flood of white settlers into the mountains and the surrounding foothills. The sudden immigration came into conflict with the Cheyenne and the Arapaho Indians who inhabited the area, eventually leading to the Colorado War in 1864.
Conflict between the Native Americans and the miners spread, and the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes made wagon travel extremely dangerous across Colorado's eastern plains. The warriors had been harassing white settlers with scattered Indian raids. Territorial governor John Evans sent Col. John Chivington to quiet the Indians at the head of a locally-raised militia. After a few skirmishes and an effective warpath on the part of the Indians, many of the Cheyennes and Arapahos were ready for peace and camped near Fort Lyon on the eastern plains.
Early in September, Maj. Edward W. Wynkoop arranged a peace meeting between Gov. John Evans of Colorado Territory and several chiefs from the Arapaho and Cheyenne Indian tribes. When he received word of Wynkoop's plans, commanding Gen. Samuel R. Curtis sent word that there would not be any peace could be made until he approved the terms and until the guilty Indians first were punished for their depredations.
Both of the tribes had recently signed a treaty with the United States in which they ceded their lands to the United States and agreed to move to the Indian reservation to the south of Sand Creek in Oklahoma, demarcated by a line to be run due north from a point on the northern boundary of New Mexico, 15 miles west of Purgatory River, and extending to the Sandy Fork of the Arkansas River.
Black Kettle, one chief of a group of mostly Southern Cheyennes and some Arapahoes, some 800 in number, reported to Fort Lyon in an effort to declare peace.
While the Indians waited for negotiations to begin, they camped at Sand Creek, 40 miles northeast of Fort Lyon, believing they were safe, having complied with the white man's demands to lay down their arms. Feeling comfortable he sent out most of his warriors to hunt. Against the advice of military officers and civilians, Col. John M. Chivington, commanding the District of Colorado under Curtis, led the 950 100-day men of the 3rd Colorado Cavalry, the 1st Colorado with its 2 howitzers, and a detachment of the 1st New Mexico Infantry in reprisal against the Indians. The men of the 3rd Colorado had been recruited to put down the outbreak of hostilities that had begun after the Regular Army was transferred east in 1861. With their enlistments about to expire, they were eager for revenge.
On November 29, at sunrise, Chivington's troops reached the Indian village. To prevent escape, they seized the Indians' ponies and unlimbered the howitzers, training them on the still-sleeping Cheyennes and Arapaho. Soldiers attacked the village from 3 sides. When he saw the troops approaching, Black Kettle, chief of the Cheyenne, raised the U.S. flag over his lodge as a gesture of peace. Chivington also ignored the pleas of interpreter John Smith to break off the attack, and his men began shooting indiscriminately, following his orders to not take any prisoners.
Some of the warriors seized their weapons and formed a battle line 1/2 mile above the camp at Sand Creek, but their defense collapsed before overwhelming odds. The Indians contested the soldiers' pursuit for 5 miles before dispersing into the countryside. One officer, Capt. Silas Soule, a Massachusetts abolitionist, refused to follow Chivington's orders. He did not allow his cavalry company to fire into the crowd.
Estimates of the number of Indians at the encampment range between 500-1,000; 400-600 were killed, many of them women and children whose bodies had been mutilated.
Public reactions to the brutal massacre ranged from approval to condemnation, but many blamed Chivington for having committed an unpardonable act of violence that resulted in a renewed outburst of hostilities.”
As everybody can see from this account, the Indians actually formed a line to defend themselves, or so the hate America crowd would call it, against American troops. So much for their story of victimage – these people refused to be killed peacefully by our troops. When I say our troops, you know I have a lump in my throat. A lump as big as Mount Rushmore. I always have a lump in my throat when I think of American troops. I also have a hardon, but the less said about that, the better.
As many have pointed out about Haditha, the Iraqi child can be one of your craftiest enemies. It is best to shoot him in the cradle, which, in the afterlife, he will appreciate – this is how you force him to be democratic. This is what democracy is about. Similarly, can anyone doubt that looking down from heaven, those Indians slaughtered much like the Philistines by the Israelites can only be grateful that American troops were there to make them do what’s right, or pay the penalty?
The Schaeffer’s of the world also give LI a lump in his throat. But weirdly enough, not a hardon. Funny, that.
Recently, Bill O’Reilly tried to justify Haditha by referring to Americans slaughtering Nazis at Malmedy. He had that a bit wrong – it was the Nazis who were slaughtering the Americans. The tonier purlieus of the WAPO op ed page shows how to right the big Fox guy’s blunder, publishing a heartwarming tale by the father of a GI, Frank Schaeffer. Schaeffer comes out of the gate a bit ahead of O’Reilly: for instance, he claims to have read a book. The book is Norman Lewis’ Naples ’44. This is a book that is foreign to the O'reilly fan base. In this book, there are no Clancy like descriptions of the latest secret American weaponry; there are no muscular Navy Seals; and there is no obligatory sex scene – by which I mean using high tech weaponry to blow suitable enemies limb from limb, while hopefully maintaining the level of pain along their nervous system for as long as possible. Thus, we can differentiate between the audience of B.R. and the audience of Schaeffer. I would call Schaeffer’s audience the decent. The centrists. The muscular liberals.
Schaeffer quotes the following passage from Lewis' book:
“"I saw an ugly sight: a British officer interrogating a civilian, and repeatedly hitting him about the head with the chair; treatment which the [civilian], his face a mask of blood, suffered with stoicism. At the end of the interrogation, which had not been considered successful, the officer called on a private and asked him in a pleasant, conversational sort of manner, 'Would you like to take this man away, and shoot him?' The private's reply was to spit on his hands, and say, 'I don't mind if I do, sir.'
"I received confirmation . . . that American combat units were ordered by their officers to beat to death [those] who attempted to surrender to them. These men seem very naive and childlike, but some of them are beginning to question the ethics of this order.
"We liberated them from the Fascist Monster. And what is the prize? The rebirth of democracy. The glorious prospect of being able one day to choose their rulers from a list of powerful men, most of whose corruptions are generally known and accepted with weary resignation. The days of Mussolini must seem like a lost paradise compared to us."
Luckily, though, we know that all came right in the end. For why was the U.S. in WWII? To selflessly bring democracy to Italy and Germany. And Japan. That Italy was ruled for fifty years by the same party, or that the U.S. spent large sums to make sure that this was the case, which might be called bribery, treachery, and non-democratic, is one of those penny ante lefty objections.
“Judging by Lewis's diary -- and many other accounts -- the so-called Greatest Generation of World War II was often badly led and worse-behaved, and was certainly less merciful than our present-day soldiers and their leaders. We haven't carpet-bombed Baghdad or nuked Fallujah to spare the lives of our troops. Yet most Americans are glad we forced Italy, Germany and Japan to become democracies, however brutal our means.”
Yet one wonders – how about the marvelous massacres of other U.S. wars? Surely Schaeffer should dig down and find other great things the Great Spirit has led Americans to do. I’d recommend the Sand River Massacre. There, now, was a massacre. Men women and children. But who can doubt that we had the best interests of the American Indians at heart? We were only trying to force them to join a democracy, however brutal the means.
Here’s an account of it:
"The attack was initially reported in the press as a victory against a bravely-fought opponent. Within weeks, however, eyewitnesses came forward offering conflicting testimony, leading to a military investigation and two Congressional investigations into the events.
Starting in the late 1850's, the gold rush in the Rocky Mountains, then part of the western Kansas Territory, had brought a flood of white settlers into the mountains and the surrounding foothills. The sudden immigration came into conflict with the Cheyenne and the Arapaho Indians who inhabited the area, eventually leading to the Colorado War in 1864.
Conflict between the Native Americans and the miners spread, and the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes made wagon travel extremely dangerous across Colorado's eastern plains. The warriors had been harassing white settlers with scattered Indian raids. Territorial governor John Evans sent Col. John Chivington to quiet the Indians at the head of a locally-raised militia. After a few skirmishes and an effective warpath on the part of the Indians, many of the Cheyennes and Arapahos were ready for peace and camped near Fort Lyon on the eastern plains.
Early in September, Maj. Edward W. Wynkoop arranged a peace meeting between Gov. John Evans of Colorado Territory and several chiefs from the Arapaho and Cheyenne Indian tribes. When he received word of Wynkoop's plans, commanding Gen. Samuel R. Curtis sent word that there would not be any peace could be made until he approved the terms and until the guilty Indians first were punished for their depredations.
Both of the tribes had recently signed a treaty with the United States in which they ceded their lands to the United States and agreed to move to the Indian reservation to the south of Sand Creek in Oklahoma, demarcated by a line to be run due north from a point on the northern boundary of New Mexico, 15 miles west of Purgatory River, and extending to the Sandy Fork of the Arkansas River.
Black Kettle, one chief of a group of mostly Southern Cheyennes and some Arapahoes, some 800 in number, reported to Fort Lyon in an effort to declare peace.
While the Indians waited for negotiations to begin, they camped at Sand Creek, 40 miles northeast of Fort Lyon, believing they were safe, having complied with the white man's demands to lay down their arms. Feeling comfortable he sent out most of his warriors to hunt. Against the advice of military officers and civilians, Col. John M. Chivington, commanding the District of Colorado under Curtis, led the 950 100-day men of the 3rd Colorado Cavalry, the 1st Colorado with its 2 howitzers, and a detachment of the 1st New Mexico Infantry in reprisal against the Indians. The men of the 3rd Colorado had been recruited to put down the outbreak of hostilities that had begun after the Regular Army was transferred east in 1861. With their enlistments about to expire, they were eager for revenge.
On November 29, at sunrise, Chivington's troops reached the Indian village. To prevent escape, they seized the Indians' ponies and unlimbered the howitzers, training them on the still-sleeping Cheyennes and Arapaho. Soldiers attacked the village from 3 sides. When he saw the troops approaching, Black Kettle, chief of the Cheyenne, raised the U.S. flag over his lodge as a gesture of peace. Chivington also ignored the pleas of interpreter John Smith to break off the attack, and his men began shooting indiscriminately, following his orders to not take any prisoners.
Some of the warriors seized their weapons and formed a battle line 1/2 mile above the camp at Sand Creek, but their defense collapsed before overwhelming odds. The Indians contested the soldiers' pursuit for 5 miles before dispersing into the countryside. One officer, Capt. Silas Soule, a Massachusetts abolitionist, refused to follow Chivington's orders. He did not allow his cavalry company to fire into the crowd.
Estimates of the number of Indians at the encampment range between 500-1,000; 400-600 were killed, many of them women and children whose bodies had been mutilated.
Public reactions to the brutal massacre ranged from approval to condemnation, but many blamed Chivington for having committed an unpardonable act of violence that resulted in a renewed outburst of hostilities.”
As everybody can see from this account, the Indians actually formed a line to defend themselves, or so the hate America crowd would call it, against American troops. So much for their story of victimage – these people refused to be killed peacefully by our troops. When I say our troops, you know I have a lump in my throat. A lump as big as Mount Rushmore. I always have a lump in my throat when I think of American troops. I also have a hardon, but the less said about that, the better.
As many have pointed out about Haditha, the Iraqi child can be one of your craftiest enemies. It is best to shoot him in the cradle, which, in the afterlife, he will appreciate – this is how you force him to be democratic. This is what democracy is about. Similarly, can anyone doubt that looking down from heaven, those Indians slaughtered much like the Philistines by the Israelites can only be grateful that American troops were there to make them do what’s right, or pay the penalty?
The Schaeffer’s of the world also give LI a lump in his throat. But weirdly enough, not a hardon. Funny, that.
Saturday, June 03, 2006
historicality and the one armed nun
When Tom Paine came back to the U.S. in 1802, he wrote a series of letters to sorta reintroduce himself. He began by giving his impression of the New New World, as though he were the survivor of a shipwreck – and indeed, the tone and the some of the sentences irresistibly evoke Ishmael:
“AFTER an absence of almost fifteen years, I am again returned to the country in whose dangers I bore my share, and to whose greatness I contributed my part.
When I sailed for Europe, in the spring of 1787, it was my intention to return to America the next year, and enjoy in retirement the esteem of my friends, and the repose I was entitled to. I had stood out the storm of one revolution, and had no wish to embark in another. But other scenes and other circumstances than those of contemplated ease were allotted to me. The French revolution was beginning to germinate when I arrived in France. The principles of it were good, they were copied from America, and the men who conducted it were honest. But the fury of faction soon extinguished the one, and sent the other to the scaffold. Of those who began that revolution, I am almost the only survivor, and that through a thousand dangers. I owe this not to the prayers of priests, nor to the piety of hypocrites, but to the continued protection of Providence.
But while I beheld with pleasure the dawn of liberty rising in Europe, I saw with regret the lustre of it fading in America. In less than two years from the time of my departure some distant symptoms painfully suggested the idea that the principles of the revolution were expiring on the soil that produced them.”
The divide between 1776 and 1802 is considerable – an abyss. Which brings us to Andrew Abbott’s brilliant essay on the individual and the social structure that LI mentioned in our next to last post.
(We warned you that we were coming back to this topic, gentle reader!)
Abbott gets right to the point with a sentence that makes the Marx-y heart sink: “I wish to argue this afternoon that we should reinstate individuals as an important force in history.” But instead of giving us some implausible ideology a la Ludwig von Mises, Abbott has in mind something a bit more interesting, if a lot less heroic.
“To be sure, social structure can and sometimes does confer on particular individuals extraordinary power to shape the future. But the crucial explanatory question in such cases is not the quality or actions of that individual, interesting as these might be. Rather it is the conditions under which such social structures emerge and stabilize.”
Abbott begins by examining one problem with the individual, viewed in terms of the living trajectory he embodies through history: although we like to think that the periodizations of history have a real counterpart, actually, there are insurmountable difficulties in putting bottom and top bounds on these ‘things’. They are fictions. Worse, as we understand more about the effects of boundaries – via the complexity people – we see that the boundaries aren’t, and can’t be, neutral. In other words, the Weberian ideal type, the modality into which periodization is packed, isn’t just a summing over histories but a selection of ending and beginning points that inevitably effects the whole set. If this sounds like a pomo complaint about metanarratives, it is – but the interesting thing is that the pomo critique instantly transmuted into another failed attempt at periodization. The other option seemed to be sheer nihilism.
Abbott considers these options briefly, with the example of the sociological study of careers – something he has done a lot of in his work. And then he comes to the point he wants to defend:
“In brief, I shall argue that the sheer mass of the experience that individuals carry forward in time—what we might think of in demographic terms as the present residue of past cohort experience—is an immense social force. It is all too easy to ignore this force, for we fall into that ignorance almost inevitably when we take up periodized historical thinking as we so often do when we work at the group level. But the vast continuity of individuals over time in fact forbids periodic analysis, however convenient it may be. In short, individuals are central to history because it is they who are the prime reservoir of historical connection from past to present. This is what I mean by the historicality of individuals.”
Now I know what my readers are saying – you are saying, isn’t this some disguised reintroduction of that awful Dilthey crap about generations? Hey, you in the back, I do not appreciate the joke about Dilthey and the one armed nun, capisce?
Okay, the thought crossed my mind too, but Abbott makes a pretty strong case – one that could be strengthened by using the materialization of memory – newspapers, diaries, movies, media in general – as a strong form of that cohort experience.
One other theoretical note, and then let’s get down to Abbott’s cases:
“Let me start by saying in a little more detail what I mean by historicality. In the first instance, I mean continuity over time. And I argue that individuals have continuity over time to a degree that social structures do not. Note that we assume this relative dominance of individual continuity whenever we
make the common (and somewhat questionable) remark that social change is getting faster and faster. This assertion involves the assumption that individuals last longer than social structures, for only then do they have to endure the changes in the latter and hence come to realize the rapidity of its change.
In a world of which it can be said that social change in it is happening faster and faster, that is, it must be the historical continuity of individuals that provides the sinews linking past and present. It is the historicality of individuals that enables us, even forces us, to know social change.”
Now, what does it mean to say that individuals have continuity over time that social structures lack? This might strike us as exactly backwards. This is how Abbott explains it, first using the example of the corporation and the changes in its various persona – the famous intangible capital of corporations, and then going on to other social organizations:
“… the vast majority of social structures are not corporations or even formal organizations.They are things like neighborhoods, occupations, newspaper readerships, church congregations, social classes, ethnicities, technological communities, and consumption groups: often disorganized or unorganized but nonetheless consequential as social structures. These often do not have formal records. If they do, these records are often of diverse kind, changing rapidly over time. And even their nonrecorded memories are scattered through diverse people having diverse relations to them.Only a few members of them have more than a miniscule connection with the whole body of those memories. Such social structures have quite diaphanous historicality. Their vast riot of memories is embodied in neither a few persons nor a legal being. Because their memories are widely distributed and their records often weak, such structures can change quickly and easily. There is little to keep them coherent over time. My discipline of sociology, for example, has been something like a social reality for about a century. In that period it has drifted quite rapidly from being a progressive and fairly religious common interest group of do-gooders, reformers, and political academics to a group of highly professionalized social scientists with an exclusive disciplinary association that aims to produce college teachers. Much of the reason for this change lies in the sheer ease with which the discipline can forget its past—a past that is expiring as I speak in decent silence in the minds of emeritus colleagues.”
Hmm, this post is getting overlarge. LI will do a couple more posts, going from Abbott to Paine to the end of the target cities of the Cold War – as LI pursues our eternal white whale, what went wrong with America????
“AFTER an absence of almost fifteen years, I am again returned to the country in whose dangers I bore my share, and to whose greatness I contributed my part.
When I sailed for Europe, in the spring of 1787, it was my intention to return to America the next year, and enjoy in retirement the esteem of my friends, and the repose I was entitled to. I had stood out the storm of one revolution, and had no wish to embark in another. But other scenes and other circumstances than those of contemplated ease were allotted to me. The French revolution was beginning to germinate when I arrived in France. The principles of it were good, they were copied from America, and the men who conducted it were honest. But the fury of faction soon extinguished the one, and sent the other to the scaffold. Of those who began that revolution, I am almost the only survivor, and that through a thousand dangers. I owe this not to the prayers of priests, nor to the piety of hypocrites, but to the continued protection of Providence.
But while I beheld with pleasure the dawn of liberty rising in Europe, I saw with regret the lustre of it fading in America. In less than two years from the time of my departure some distant symptoms painfully suggested the idea that the principles of the revolution were expiring on the soil that produced them.”
The divide between 1776 and 1802 is considerable – an abyss. Which brings us to Andrew Abbott’s brilliant essay on the individual and the social structure that LI mentioned in our next to last post.
(We warned you that we were coming back to this topic, gentle reader!)
Abbott gets right to the point with a sentence that makes the Marx-y heart sink: “I wish to argue this afternoon that we should reinstate individuals as an important force in history.” But instead of giving us some implausible ideology a la Ludwig von Mises, Abbott has in mind something a bit more interesting, if a lot less heroic.
“To be sure, social structure can and sometimes does confer on particular individuals extraordinary power to shape the future. But the crucial explanatory question in such cases is not the quality or actions of that individual, interesting as these might be. Rather it is the conditions under which such social structures emerge and stabilize.”
Abbott begins by examining one problem with the individual, viewed in terms of the living trajectory he embodies through history: although we like to think that the periodizations of history have a real counterpart, actually, there are insurmountable difficulties in putting bottom and top bounds on these ‘things’. They are fictions. Worse, as we understand more about the effects of boundaries – via the complexity people – we see that the boundaries aren’t, and can’t be, neutral. In other words, the Weberian ideal type, the modality into which periodization is packed, isn’t just a summing over histories but a selection of ending and beginning points that inevitably effects the whole set. If this sounds like a pomo complaint about metanarratives, it is – but the interesting thing is that the pomo critique instantly transmuted into another failed attempt at periodization. The other option seemed to be sheer nihilism.
Abbott considers these options briefly, with the example of the sociological study of careers – something he has done a lot of in his work. And then he comes to the point he wants to defend:
“In brief, I shall argue that the sheer mass of the experience that individuals carry forward in time—what we might think of in demographic terms as the present residue of past cohort experience—is an immense social force. It is all too easy to ignore this force, for we fall into that ignorance almost inevitably when we take up periodized historical thinking as we so often do when we work at the group level. But the vast continuity of individuals over time in fact forbids periodic analysis, however convenient it may be. In short, individuals are central to history because it is they who are the prime reservoir of historical connection from past to present. This is what I mean by the historicality of individuals.”
Now I know what my readers are saying – you are saying, isn’t this some disguised reintroduction of that awful Dilthey crap about generations? Hey, you in the back, I do not appreciate the joke about Dilthey and the one armed nun, capisce?
Okay, the thought crossed my mind too, but Abbott makes a pretty strong case – one that could be strengthened by using the materialization of memory – newspapers, diaries, movies, media in general – as a strong form of that cohort experience.
One other theoretical note, and then let’s get down to Abbott’s cases:
“Let me start by saying in a little more detail what I mean by historicality. In the first instance, I mean continuity over time. And I argue that individuals have continuity over time to a degree that social structures do not. Note that we assume this relative dominance of individual continuity whenever we
make the common (and somewhat questionable) remark that social change is getting faster and faster. This assertion involves the assumption that individuals last longer than social structures, for only then do they have to endure the changes in the latter and hence come to realize the rapidity of its change.
In a world of which it can be said that social change in it is happening faster and faster, that is, it must be the historical continuity of individuals that provides the sinews linking past and present. It is the historicality of individuals that enables us, even forces us, to know social change.”
Now, what does it mean to say that individuals have continuity over time that social structures lack? This might strike us as exactly backwards. This is how Abbott explains it, first using the example of the corporation and the changes in its various persona – the famous intangible capital of corporations, and then going on to other social organizations:
“… the vast majority of social structures are not corporations or even formal organizations.They are things like neighborhoods, occupations, newspaper readerships, church congregations, social classes, ethnicities, technological communities, and consumption groups: often disorganized or unorganized but nonetheless consequential as social structures. These often do not have formal records. If they do, these records are often of diverse kind, changing rapidly over time. And even their nonrecorded memories are scattered through diverse people having diverse relations to them.Only a few members of them have more than a miniscule connection with the whole body of those memories. Such social structures have quite diaphanous historicality. Their vast riot of memories is embodied in neither a few persons nor a legal being. Because their memories are widely distributed and their records often weak, such structures can change quickly and easily. There is little to keep them coherent over time. My discipline of sociology, for example, has been something like a social reality for about a century. In that period it has drifted quite rapidly from being a progressive and fairly religious common interest group of do-gooders, reformers, and political academics to a group of highly professionalized social scientists with an exclusive disciplinary association that aims to produce college teachers. Much of the reason for this change lies in the sheer ease with which the discipline can forget its past—a past that is expiring as I speak in decent silence in the minds of emeritus colleagues.”
Hmm, this post is getting overlarge. LI will do a couple more posts, going from Abbott to Paine to the end of the target cities of the Cold War – as LI pursues our eternal white whale, what went wrong with America????
Friday, June 02, 2006
bliss it was to be alive...
LI’s faithful reader, Mr. New York Pervert, left a comment a few days ago about the Homeland Security redistribution of Homeland Security money away from NYC and Washington D.C. and towards St. Louis and Kansas City – on the premise that the heartland is threatened with imminent attack, whereas whose ever heard of a hick place like New York City?
The woman who headed the “defund the places that we are supposed to secure” project for Homeland Security, Tracy Henke, is a piece of work. I mean, in the sense of a joy forever. The Bush culture has produced its flashes in the pan, but one can only hope that Henke is as immortal as, well, Ponzi. There was a bit about her in the Washington Post that has not, I’m surprised to see, been circulating around the bloggysphere. So, doing my part, here’s the cherry of it:
Henke had caused a ruckus last year when she demanded that a Justice Department report on racial disparities in police treatment of blacks in traffic cases be taken out of a news release. A respected career employee was demoted after protesting the move.
But indications are that Henke's working hard and handling her new post -- an important job to make sure scarce anti-terrorism money is spent effectively across the country -- with appropriate priorities.
Take this e-mail she sent to staff members last week:
"Another item I mentioned during the All-Hands meeting was the need to seek suggestions on how we can neatly encapsulate what we do at G&T to help others understand (inside and out of the department)," Henke wrote. She went on to say that when she was at the Justice Department her job included handing out money, being a contact beacon for states and local communities and helping victims of crime. "I used the 'Santa Claus, Batman and Mother Teresa' analogy" to sum up the functions.
But here's the problem. "Mother Teresa won't work for G&T," she wrote. "I requested that you think about and submit suggestions for another analogy to fill in the blank 'Santa Claus, Batman and ______.' This analogy is not for publication, but to be used in conversation to assist individuals in understanding the great work, activities and possibilities of G&T. Several of you have sent suggestions. Thank you for your interest and great ideas.
"To make certain that everyone has the opportunity to participate and to be involved," she wrote, "I have asked Anne Voigt [an aide] to chair a short-term committee to work on this for me. If you could please e-mail your suggestions to Anne . . . she will assemble the options. I ask that if you are interested in helping her, please e-mail her your name by COB on Tuesday, March 7. She will put the names in a hat (bowl or anything else we can find) and we will pick the other individuals to serve on the short-term committee with her.
"This committee will narrow the options down to no more than three and we will then have an all-hands vote to select the 'Santa Claus, Batman and ?' The individual whose suggestion is selected will be invited to lunch with me," she wrote, "my treat."
Feel safer already, don't you?”
Oh, what bliss to be ruled by people like this! The worst, the most idiotic, the most incompetent, the most mendacious, the one’s without a single redeeming social virtue, have created a sort of amusement park in D.C. for their own kind. My cold spectator’s heart brims with joy – every day, they simply give. And give some more. My only complaint -- and it is a teeny one -- is that they live on this planet. It would be nice if they were ruling another planet. That's all. A minor complaint, but I thought I'd put it out there.
The woman who headed the “defund the places that we are supposed to secure” project for Homeland Security, Tracy Henke, is a piece of work. I mean, in the sense of a joy forever. The Bush culture has produced its flashes in the pan, but one can only hope that Henke is as immortal as, well, Ponzi. There was a bit about her in the Washington Post that has not, I’m surprised to see, been circulating around the bloggysphere. So, doing my part, here’s the cherry of it:
Henke had caused a ruckus last year when she demanded that a Justice Department report on racial disparities in police treatment of blacks in traffic cases be taken out of a news release. A respected career employee was demoted after protesting the move.
But indications are that Henke's working hard and handling her new post -- an important job to make sure scarce anti-terrorism money is spent effectively across the country -- with appropriate priorities.
Take this e-mail she sent to staff members last week:
"Another item I mentioned during the All-Hands meeting was the need to seek suggestions on how we can neatly encapsulate what we do at G&T to help others understand (inside and out of the department)," Henke wrote. She went on to say that when she was at the Justice Department her job included handing out money, being a contact beacon for states and local communities and helping victims of crime. "I used the 'Santa Claus, Batman and Mother Teresa' analogy" to sum up the functions.
But here's the problem. "Mother Teresa won't work for G&T," she wrote. "I requested that you think about and submit suggestions for another analogy to fill in the blank 'Santa Claus, Batman and ______.' This analogy is not for publication, but to be used in conversation to assist individuals in understanding the great work, activities and possibilities of G&T. Several of you have sent suggestions. Thank you for your interest and great ideas.
"To make certain that everyone has the opportunity to participate and to be involved," she wrote, "I have asked Anne Voigt [an aide] to chair a short-term committee to work on this for me. If you could please e-mail your suggestions to Anne . . . she will assemble the options. I ask that if you are interested in helping her, please e-mail her your name by COB on Tuesday, March 7. She will put the names in a hat (bowl or anything else we can find) and we will pick the other individuals to serve on the short-term committee with her.
"This committee will narrow the options down to no more than three and we will then have an all-hands vote to select the 'Santa Claus, Batman and ?' The individual whose suggestion is selected will be invited to lunch with me," she wrote, "my treat."
Feel safer already, don't you?”
Oh, what bliss to be ruled by people like this! The worst, the most idiotic, the most incompetent, the most mendacious, the one’s without a single redeeming social virtue, have created a sort of amusement park in D.C. for their own kind. My cold spectator’s heart brims with joy – every day, they simply give. And give some more. My only complaint -- and it is a teeny one -- is that they live on this planet. It would be nice if they were ruling another planet. That's all. A minor complaint, but I thought I'd put it out there.
The birth of HP out of the spirit of DEFCON
Heidegger’s critique of the subject was aimed at getting metaphysics out of the magic circle of the subject; for this purpose he used the term Dasein. In 1945, according to Eileen Welsome’s Plutonium Files, the medical staff at a Rochester hospital went Heidegger one better. The staff began injecting unwitting patients with plutonium in an experiment conducted in tandem with other doctors across the country, organized by the Department of War – and eventually absorbed by the Atomic Energy Commission. The staff referred to the patients as HP – Human Product.
We are all HP now, processed through 60 years of DEFCON [defense condition] culture. One of the truths of the post 9/11 period that LI holds to be self evident is that after 9/11, everything was the same – except more so. The trillion dollars of extra spending on the military has, of course, done everything except capture the 4 or 5 thousand people who attacked on 9/11 – for they now serve the vital function of being the threat on tap. Although there are always threats on tap, they volunteered. And DEFCON culture, and all of us HP, leaped to the challenge.
In LI’s last post about Bellarchy, we promised we’d be back for Bellarchy 2, like some subdeb Hollywood blockbuster. But we have been unable to piece together all the symbols that we’ve been gathering to illustrate the War State. LI is in a poetic mood, not a discursive one – we can see meanings, but we can’t directly tell you what they are. These things strike, you know. For we have one, overriding question, which is this: how did the war state create plug and play HP? The culture of acquiescence? In a story published in the WAPO about the Hanson Plutonium Plant in Richland, Washington a few years ago, there was a passage that seems so richly symbolic that we know it means something larger, something on a Delillo scale:
“Richland sprouted Atomic Bowling Lanes, an Atomic Body Shop, Atomic TV Repair, even an "Atomic Man." He was Harold McCloskey, a technician who survived a 1976 accident at Hanford that sprayed his face with the largest human dose of radiation ever recorded. He became the most thoroughly studied nuclear victim in America. Baggies of his feces and urine (labeled "Caution Radioactive") were stored for years in laboratory refrigerators and freezers across the Hanford site. After the accident, McCloskey was almost blind and his face could set off Geiger counters 50 feet away. But he was pro-Hanford until the end (he died of a heart attack in 1987). "Just forget about me being anti-nuclear, because I'm not," he said a decade after the accident. "We need nuclear energy."
Football players from Richland High wore a mushroom cloud on their helmets and called themselves the Bombers. The symbol of the atom was carved atop stone columns at the entrance to the cemetery. When liberated from federal ownership and allowed self-government in 1958, Richland's residents staged a simulated atomic explosion in a vacant lot on the edge of town. And when the Cold War began to wind down, announcement of the closure of N reactor, one of Hanford's largest, brought mournful Tri-Citians into the streets by the thousands. They held candles and sang "Kumbaya."”
Kumbaya! The HP beast slouches towards the perfect anthem, the favorite song of my Vacation Bible School days back there in Clarkston, Georgia. Someone’s dying Lord – and it is us HP, mourning the amazing structures of the Cold War, the architecture, the fallout, the atom soldiers, the preparedness, the dictionary of acronyms and phrases, the way we turned, turned, turned.
Thomas Paine wrote, in the Rights of Man:
“As war is the system of Government on the old construction, the animosity which Nations reciprocally entertain, is nothing more than what the policy of their Governments excites to keep up the spirit of the system. Each Government accuses the other of perfidy, intrigue, and ambition, as a means of heating the imagination of their respective Nations, and incensing them to hostilities. Man is not the enemy of man, but through the medium of a false system of Government.”
Paine’s words have been kidnapped for many reasons – they’ve been kidnapped to justify the ‘moral interventionist’ position of perpetual war and domination by U.S. However, for LI, what is important is the idea that war is a system – a system of the state. LI feels – instinctively – that the Defcon system is connected to the present, systematic inability to deal with the problems that have emerged with the treadmill of production as it is currently maintained. That war and environmental disaster are mutually dependent. But we aren’t sure how to go from that instinct, a bias really, to an argument. In a future post, we are going to make an argument about the geneology of HP through a detour – a consideration of an article by Andrew Abbott published last year in the Social Science History journal, The Historicality of Individuals.
PS - though it has been getting zip publicity, the Defense Department's grotesque proposal to test 700 tons of high explosive to simulate the effects of a low-yield nuclear explosion named (oh, the inevitability of names) Divine Strake (a name o redolent of Rumsfeldianism that surely its mere mention sends Midge Decter, Rummy's official panagyrist, into spasms of sexual passion) has been postponed -- due, perhaps, to protests mounted by downwinders in Nevada and Utah. The proposed test would scatter soil that has been well and truly irradiated by years of nuclear testing over Southern Utah -- once again.
We are all HP now, processed through 60 years of DEFCON [defense condition] culture. One of the truths of the post 9/11 period that LI holds to be self evident is that after 9/11, everything was the same – except more so. The trillion dollars of extra spending on the military has, of course, done everything except capture the 4 or 5 thousand people who attacked on 9/11 – for they now serve the vital function of being the threat on tap. Although there are always threats on tap, they volunteered. And DEFCON culture, and all of us HP, leaped to the challenge.
In LI’s last post about Bellarchy, we promised we’d be back for Bellarchy 2, like some subdeb Hollywood blockbuster. But we have been unable to piece together all the symbols that we’ve been gathering to illustrate the War State. LI is in a poetic mood, not a discursive one – we can see meanings, but we can’t directly tell you what they are. These things strike, you know. For we have one, overriding question, which is this: how did the war state create plug and play HP? The culture of acquiescence? In a story published in the WAPO about the Hanson Plutonium Plant in Richland, Washington a few years ago, there was a passage that seems so richly symbolic that we know it means something larger, something on a Delillo scale:
“Richland sprouted Atomic Bowling Lanes, an Atomic Body Shop, Atomic TV Repair, even an "Atomic Man." He was Harold McCloskey, a technician who survived a 1976 accident at Hanford that sprayed his face with the largest human dose of radiation ever recorded. He became the most thoroughly studied nuclear victim in America. Baggies of his feces and urine (labeled "Caution Radioactive") were stored for years in laboratory refrigerators and freezers across the Hanford site. After the accident, McCloskey was almost blind and his face could set off Geiger counters 50 feet away. But he was pro-Hanford until the end (he died of a heart attack in 1987). "Just forget about me being anti-nuclear, because I'm not," he said a decade after the accident. "We need nuclear energy."
Football players from Richland High wore a mushroom cloud on their helmets and called themselves the Bombers. The symbol of the atom was carved atop stone columns at the entrance to the cemetery. When liberated from federal ownership and allowed self-government in 1958, Richland's residents staged a simulated atomic explosion in a vacant lot on the edge of town. And when the Cold War began to wind down, announcement of the closure of N reactor, one of Hanford's largest, brought mournful Tri-Citians into the streets by the thousands. They held candles and sang "Kumbaya."”
Kumbaya! The HP beast slouches towards the perfect anthem, the favorite song of my Vacation Bible School days back there in Clarkston, Georgia. Someone’s dying Lord – and it is us HP, mourning the amazing structures of the Cold War, the architecture, the fallout, the atom soldiers, the preparedness, the dictionary of acronyms and phrases, the way we turned, turned, turned.
Thomas Paine wrote, in the Rights of Man:
“As war is the system of Government on the old construction, the animosity which Nations reciprocally entertain, is nothing more than what the policy of their Governments excites to keep up the spirit of the system. Each Government accuses the other of perfidy, intrigue, and ambition, as a means of heating the imagination of their respective Nations, and incensing them to hostilities. Man is not the enemy of man, but through the medium of a false system of Government.”
Paine’s words have been kidnapped for many reasons – they’ve been kidnapped to justify the ‘moral interventionist’ position of perpetual war and domination by U.S. However, for LI, what is important is the idea that war is a system – a system of the state. LI feels – instinctively – that the Defcon system is connected to the present, systematic inability to deal with the problems that have emerged with the treadmill of production as it is currently maintained. That war and environmental disaster are mutually dependent. But we aren’t sure how to go from that instinct, a bias really, to an argument. In a future post, we are going to make an argument about the geneology of HP through a detour – a consideration of an article by Andrew Abbott published last year in the Social Science History journal, The Historicality of Individuals.
PS - though it has been getting zip publicity, the Defense Department's grotesque proposal to test 700 tons of high explosive to simulate the effects of a low-yield nuclear explosion named (oh, the inevitability of names) Divine Strake (a name o redolent of Rumsfeldianism that surely its mere mention sends Midge Decter, Rummy's official panagyrist, into spasms of sexual passion) has been postponed -- due, perhaps, to protests mounted by downwinders in Nevada and Utah. The proposed test would scatter soil that has been well and truly irradiated by years of nuclear testing over Southern Utah -- once again.
Thursday, June 01, 2006
putting the jack back in the jack in the box
The Washington Post has done us pikers in the hinterlands a favor by publishing an editorial lavish in its praise of the Administration’s offer to talk to Iran. The praise tells us that the offer is a joke, and the editorial makes it clear that the offer is a joke, cut from much the same comedy routine that was played, in the fall of 2002, as the administration pretended that it wanted the sanction of the U.N. to play cop against Iraq for violating U.N. sanctions. Since the WAPO editorial board speaks in the forked tongue specialized in by Fred Hiattish/Charles Krauthammerish kinds of think tankers, their support for the Bush initiative is a signal from the V.P., Darth Vader, that this is a sop to fools.
However, the real fools are the V.P. and our war criminal Department of War guy, Donald Rumsfeld. While they want a war and they want it now, the idea that the U.S. is now going to show it gave an inch and should be rewarded with the landing of troops on the Iranian side of the Persian Gulf and a triumphant march to Teheran isn’t going to happen. The majority in the world, unlike the majority of the editorial board of WAPO, understands the rank hypocrisy of rewarding those powers that didn’t sign the nuclear treaty and have gone ahead and developed weapons – India, Pakistan, and Israel – while putting sanctions leading to war on Iran for basically violating the fine print of a nuclear treaty. In essence, the U.S. policy in the Bush years has been -- we reserve the right to overthrow regimes we don't like on flimsy pretenses. It is an extension of the U.S. policy in Central and South America low these many years. It has cracked there, and its crackup globally is right before our eyes.
The thing about re-running comedy routines is – we get to know the jokes. The Jacks are all out of the Jack in the boxes, and though we stuff them back in, close the lid, and then open it again, the jacks aren’t going to surprise those of us who are mentally over the age of two. This means, of course, that Bush’s latest ploy will be ferociously backed by the usual zombie segment of the population, who will dart rays of disdain at anyone who doubts the utter sincerity of the White House – and, as the White House contradicts itself, will insist that the series of contradictions are part of one overarching truth. LI has written before that we don’t believe that the Bushies will bomb Iran – we think the domestic risks are too high. Oil spiking to one hundred a barrel will simply bury the GOP in the South, a gashogging part of the country that deserts those leaders that would put a dent in the three car garage life style. The filibustering spirit is one thing, being able to drive the jacked up truck down to the grocery store for a loaf of bread is another. Given the way in which the administration is playing with the national guard like a game of pick up sticks, and given that the guard will no doubt be unavailable for a crucial three or four days in late summer when another hurricane eats up another American coastal area, our idea is that the house limit on military action might be very near.
Typically, the offer of talks, which in 2001 would have, perhaps, been of crucial importance to the moderates, is now going to shore up the politics of Ahmadinejad, who we believe may be very underrated in the U.S. – because he is an Antisemite from hell who seems bent on pruning back the open society (however tiny the advance towards open society was under Khatami). There is a tendency to talk him down on the anti-war end, and to talk up the reasonable mullahs, which eerily echoes what was said in the beginning of Iranian revolution about Khomeini – you’ll remember, Khomeini was a flash in the pan, and the real forces of Iranian politics, whoever they were, were going to take over the state, using Khomeini as a convenient figurehead. Juan Cole recently wrote a blog about Ahmadinejad’s essential mock status, for instance. But at the moment, we are more convinced by Ray Takeyh’s view of the evolving nature of Ahmadinejad’s power.
However, the real fools are the V.P. and our war criminal Department of War guy, Donald Rumsfeld. While they want a war and they want it now, the idea that the U.S. is now going to show it gave an inch and should be rewarded with the landing of troops on the Iranian side of the Persian Gulf and a triumphant march to Teheran isn’t going to happen. The majority in the world, unlike the majority of the editorial board of WAPO, understands the rank hypocrisy of rewarding those powers that didn’t sign the nuclear treaty and have gone ahead and developed weapons – India, Pakistan, and Israel – while putting sanctions leading to war on Iran for basically violating the fine print of a nuclear treaty. In essence, the U.S. policy in the Bush years has been -- we reserve the right to overthrow regimes we don't like on flimsy pretenses. It is an extension of the U.S. policy in Central and South America low these many years. It has cracked there, and its crackup globally is right before our eyes.
The thing about re-running comedy routines is – we get to know the jokes. The Jacks are all out of the Jack in the boxes, and though we stuff them back in, close the lid, and then open it again, the jacks aren’t going to surprise those of us who are mentally over the age of two. This means, of course, that Bush’s latest ploy will be ferociously backed by the usual zombie segment of the population, who will dart rays of disdain at anyone who doubts the utter sincerity of the White House – and, as the White House contradicts itself, will insist that the series of contradictions are part of one overarching truth. LI has written before that we don’t believe that the Bushies will bomb Iran – we think the domestic risks are too high. Oil spiking to one hundred a barrel will simply bury the GOP in the South, a gashogging part of the country that deserts those leaders that would put a dent in the three car garage life style. The filibustering spirit is one thing, being able to drive the jacked up truck down to the grocery store for a loaf of bread is another. Given the way in which the administration is playing with the national guard like a game of pick up sticks, and given that the guard will no doubt be unavailable for a crucial three or four days in late summer when another hurricane eats up another American coastal area, our idea is that the house limit on military action might be very near.
Typically, the offer of talks, which in 2001 would have, perhaps, been of crucial importance to the moderates, is now going to shore up the politics of Ahmadinejad, who we believe may be very underrated in the U.S. – because he is an Antisemite from hell who seems bent on pruning back the open society (however tiny the advance towards open society was under Khatami). There is a tendency to talk him down on the anti-war end, and to talk up the reasonable mullahs, which eerily echoes what was said in the beginning of Iranian revolution about Khomeini – you’ll remember, Khomeini was a flash in the pan, and the real forces of Iranian politics, whoever they were, were going to take over the state, using Khomeini as a convenient figurehead. Juan Cole recently wrote a blog about Ahmadinejad’s essential mock status, for instance. But at the moment, we are more convinced by Ray Takeyh’s view of the evolving nature of Ahmadinejad’s power.
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
jean jacques juge par tout le monde
This week’s philosophical spat is about a spat between philosophers. At least in the U.K., there were reviews in all the major venues of Rousseau’s Dog, a book about Hume and Rousseau by the team that is doing all the quarrels of all the philosophers (Popper vs. Wittgenstein, Bullwinkle vs. Rocky), David Edmonds and John Eidinow. Ophelia Benson, over at Butterflies and Wheels, is naturally taking the Humean side. The review in the Sunday Times is a sad commentary on the currently low wattage of the conservative intelligentsia. The reviewer ropes the book together with one on Voltaire’s mistress, says various astonishing things about how boring and unread Voltaire is (the more astonishing as he seems to think Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas is just the antidote for the tedium of Candide – although one suspects that Rasselas is a distant memory, given the reviewer’s general state of incredible barbarism), and then repents a bit – it turns out Voltaire, like Donald Trump, made money, so he is a good guy all the way around. In the Spectator the reviewer concentrates much bile on poor old David Hume, accusing him of wanting to burn all books that didn’t contain mathematics – surely a reading of Hume that underemphasizes the irony.
The Guardian takes a chapter from the book. Unfortunately, if this passage is representative, we are not about to read the whole thing. Here’s the intro to Rousseau as the Johnny Depp character from the Pirates of the Caribbean:
“The year was 1766 and Rousseau had just cause to fear for his life. For more than three years he had been a refugee, forced to move on several times. His radical tract, The Social Contract , with its famous opening salvo, "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains", had been violently condemned. Even more threatening to the French Catholic church was Emile , in which Rousseau advocated denying the clergy a role in the education of the young. An arrest warrant was issued in Paris and his books were publicly burned.
In The Confessions , a literary landmark described as the first modern autobiography, Rousseau spoke of "the cry of unparalleled fury" that went up across Europe. "I was an infidel, an atheist, a lunatic, a madman, a wild beast, a wolf . . ."
Fleeing France, he had found safe haven in a remote village in his native Switzerland. But soon the local priest began to whip up hatred against him, charging him with being a heretic. The atmosphere turned ugly. Rousseau was abused in the street. Some believed this lean, dark man whose eyes were full of fire was possessed by the devil.”
Notice the remarkable profusion of the passive tense in the first paragraph. The Social Contract was condemned, an arrest warrant was issued. The invisible hand is everywhere. And then, dropping or drooping down to the second, we meet the ‘described as’ of the Confessions… No reference, nor any standing up and simply ‘describing’ it oneself. This is the kind of thing that I cordially hate – or that I can be described as cordially hating.
As for the intro to Hume – it is, if anything, worse, since it takes one of Hume’s great phrases – that the Treatise of Human Nature fell “stillborn from the press” – and squashes it into a gummy muddle:
“Today, Hume is known above all for his philosophy, but then he was renowned for being an historian. His first philosophical work, The Treatise of Human Nature , had been, if not exactly ignored, then certainly not acclaimed as the sublime work of genius it is.” This isn’t writing – this is a species of cribbing.
Since Popper and Wittgenstein, the last in the series of battling philosophes, represent genuinely different philosophical positions, it is tempting to pit Hume against Rousseau as similar champions. The Spectator turns them into factotums of that dismal perennial, the Analytics vs. the Continentals.
This is how Edmonds and Eidenow sum the two men up:
“In hindsight, it seems unlikely that they were ever going to get along, personally or intellectually. Hume was a combination of reason, doubt and scepticism. Rousseau was a creature of feeling, alienation, imagination and certainty. While Hume's outlook was unadventurous and temperate, Rousseau was by instinct rebellious; Hume was an optimist, Rousseau a pessimist; Hume gregarious, Rousseau a loner. Hume was disposed to compromise, Rousseau to confrontation. In style, Rousseau revelled in paradox; Hume revered clarity. Rousseau's language was pyrotechnical and emotional, Hume's straightforward and dispassionate. JYT Greig wrote in his 1931 biography of Hume, "The annals of literature seldom furnish us with two contemporary writers of the first rank, both called philosophers, who cancel one another out with almost mathematical precision."
While they may be described now as thinkers in "the Age of Enlightenment", how far "Enlightenment" covers a common national experience or meaning is a matter of vigorous dispute. A particular reading of French history tends to shape the general idea of "the Enlightenment" as, broadly, the French philosophes ' belief that the application of critical reason to received traditions and structures would bring human advancement. The dominating Enlightenment narrative becomes a small and easily identifiable group of brilliant people, a central activity, the Encyclopedie ; the sweetness of the salons balanced by the risk of imprisonment, the focus on reason, and the whole enterprise terminating in the guillotine.”
The chain of opposing characteristics loops about itself a bit – rebellious, certain, pessimistic, paradoxical – and Hume revering clarity is a bit of a twist – in fact, it is a bit of a twist to oppose the clear and the paradoxical, given the way empiricism proceeded by ‘problems’ like the Molyneaux cube.
Hume’s little brochure on the matter can be found here.
And this is from Hume’s correspondence:
“You will see that the only possible alleviation of this man's crime is that he is entirely mad; and even then he will be allowed a dangerous and pernicious madman, and of the blackest and most atrocious mind. The King and Queen of England expressed a strong desire to see these papers, and I was obliged to put them into their hand. They read them with avidity, and entertain the same sentiments that must strike every one. The king's opinion confirms me in the resolution not to give them to the public, unless I be forced to it by some attack on the side of my adversary, which it will therefore be wisdom in him to avoid.' Private Corres. p. 210.
Rousseau to Lord Marischal.
'[Wooton] 7 Septembre. Il [Hume] a marché jusqu'ici dans les ténèbres, il s'est caché, mais maintenant il se montre à découvert. Il a rempli l'Angleterre, la France, les gazettes, l'Europe entière, de cris auxquels je ne sais que répondre, et d'injures dont je me croirais digne si je daignais les repousser.' Œuvres de Rousseau xxiv. 393.
Up until now, he has advanced in the shadows, hiding himself, but now he walks uncovered. He has filled England, France, the newspapers, and all of Europe with cries to which I can’t help but respond, and insults of which, if I deigned to push back against them, I would think myself justified.
And here’s Voltaire:
Voltaire to Damilaville.
'[Ferney] 15 Octobre. Il [Hume] prouve que Jean-Jacques est un maître fou, et un ingrat pétri d'un sot orgueil; mais je ne crois pas que ces vérités méritent d'etre publiées; il faut que les choses soient ou bien plaisantes, ou bien intéressantes pour que la presse s'en mêle…. Je pense que la publicité de cette querelle ne servirait qu'à faire tort à la philosophie. J'aurais donné une partie de mon bien pour que Rousseau eût été un homme sage; mais cela n'est pas dans sa nature; il n'y a pas moyen de faire un aigle d'un papillon: c'est assez, ce me semble, que tous les gens de lettres lui rendent justice, et d'ailleurs sa plus grande punition est d'être oublié.'
“He proves that Jean Jacques is a master fool, and an ingrate kneaded by the stupidest vanity; but I don’t think these are the kind of truths that need to be published; things have to be either more amusing or interesting than this for them to be mixed up in the newspapers. … I think that the news of this quarrel will only serve to make philosophy look bad. I would have given a good part of my property to have made Rousseau a wise man; but it isn’t in his nature; you can’t make an eagle out of butterfly. It is enough, I think, that all the gens de letters think that Hume is right. Besides, Rousseau’s greatest punishment will be to be forgotten.”
The Guardian takes a chapter from the book. Unfortunately, if this passage is representative, we are not about to read the whole thing. Here’s the intro to Rousseau as the Johnny Depp character from the Pirates of the Caribbean:
“The year was 1766 and Rousseau had just cause to fear for his life. For more than three years he had been a refugee, forced to move on several times. His radical tract, The Social Contract , with its famous opening salvo, "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains", had been violently condemned. Even more threatening to the French Catholic church was Emile , in which Rousseau advocated denying the clergy a role in the education of the young. An arrest warrant was issued in Paris and his books were publicly burned.
In The Confessions , a literary landmark described as the first modern autobiography, Rousseau spoke of "the cry of unparalleled fury" that went up across Europe. "I was an infidel, an atheist, a lunatic, a madman, a wild beast, a wolf . . ."
Fleeing France, he had found safe haven in a remote village in his native Switzerland. But soon the local priest began to whip up hatred against him, charging him with being a heretic. The atmosphere turned ugly. Rousseau was abused in the street. Some believed this lean, dark man whose eyes were full of fire was possessed by the devil.”
Notice the remarkable profusion of the passive tense in the first paragraph. The Social Contract was condemned, an arrest warrant was issued. The invisible hand is everywhere. And then, dropping or drooping down to the second, we meet the ‘described as’ of the Confessions… No reference, nor any standing up and simply ‘describing’ it oneself. This is the kind of thing that I cordially hate – or that I can be described as cordially hating.
As for the intro to Hume – it is, if anything, worse, since it takes one of Hume’s great phrases – that the Treatise of Human Nature fell “stillborn from the press” – and squashes it into a gummy muddle:
“Today, Hume is known above all for his philosophy, but then he was renowned for being an historian. His first philosophical work, The Treatise of Human Nature , had been, if not exactly ignored, then certainly not acclaimed as the sublime work of genius it is.” This isn’t writing – this is a species of cribbing.
Since Popper and Wittgenstein, the last in the series of battling philosophes, represent genuinely different philosophical positions, it is tempting to pit Hume against Rousseau as similar champions. The Spectator turns them into factotums of that dismal perennial, the Analytics vs. the Continentals.
This is how Edmonds and Eidenow sum the two men up:
“In hindsight, it seems unlikely that they were ever going to get along, personally or intellectually. Hume was a combination of reason, doubt and scepticism. Rousseau was a creature of feeling, alienation, imagination and certainty. While Hume's outlook was unadventurous and temperate, Rousseau was by instinct rebellious; Hume was an optimist, Rousseau a pessimist; Hume gregarious, Rousseau a loner. Hume was disposed to compromise, Rousseau to confrontation. In style, Rousseau revelled in paradox; Hume revered clarity. Rousseau's language was pyrotechnical and emotional, Hume's straightforward and dispassionate. JYT Greig wrote in his 1931 biography of Hume, "The annals of literature seldom furnish us with two contemporary writers of the first rank, both called philosophers, who cancel one another out with almost mathematical precision."
While they may be described now as thinkers in "the Age of Enlightenment", how far "Enlightenment" covers a common national experience or meaning is a matter of vigorous dispute. A particular reading of French history tends to shape the general idea of "the Enlightenment" as, broadly, the French philosophes ' belief that the application of critical reason to received traditions and structures would bring human advancement. The dominating Enlightenment narrative becomes a small and easily identifiable group of brilliant people, a central activity, the Encyclopedie ; the sweetness of the salons balanced by the risk of imprisonment, the focus on reason, and the whole enterprise terminating in the guillotine.”
The chain of opposing characteristics loops about itself a bit – rebellious, certain, pessimistic, paradoxical – and Hume revering clarity is a bit of a twist – in fact, it is a bit of a twist to oppose the clear and the paradoxical, given the way empiricism proceeded by ‘problems’ like the Molyneaux cube.
Hume’s little brochure on the matter can be found here.
And this is from Hume’s correspondence:
“You will see that the only possible alleviation of this man's crime is that he is entirely mad; and even then he will be allowed a dangerous and pernicious madman, and of the blackest and most atrocious mind. The King and Queen of England expressed a strong desire to see these papers, and I was obliged to put them into their hand. They read them with avidity, and entertain the same sentiments that must strike every one. The king's opinion confirms me in the resolution not to give them to the public, unless I be forced to it by some attack on the side of my adversary, which it will therefore be wisdom in him to avoid.' Private Corres. p. 210.
Rousseau to Lord Marischal.
'[Wooton] 7 Septembre. Il [Hume] a marché jusqu'ici dans les ténèbres, il s'est caché, mais maintenant il se montre à découvert. Il a rempli l'Angleterre, la France, les gazettes, l'Europe entière, de cris auxquels je ne sais que répondre, et d'injures dont je me croirais digne si je daignais les repousser.' Œuvres de Rousseau xxiv. 393.
Up until now, he has advanced in the shadows, hiding himself, but now he walks uncovered. He has filled England, France, the newspapers, and all of Europe with cries to which I can’t help but respond, and insults of which, if I deigned to push back against them, I would think myself justified.
And here’s Voltaire:
Voltaire to Damilaville.
'[Ferney] 15 Octobre. Il [Hume] prouve que Jean-Jacques est un maître fou, et un ingrat pétri d'un sot orgueil; mais je ne crois pas que ces vérités méritent d'etre publiées; il faut que les choses soient ou bien plaisantes, ou bien intéressantes pour que la presse s'en mêle…. Je pense que la publicité de cette querelle ne servirait qu'à faire tort à la philosophie. J'aurais donné une partie de mon bien pour que Rousseau eût été un homme sage; mais cela n'est pas dans sa nature; il n'y a pas moyen de faire un aigle d'un papillon: c'est assez, ce me semble, que tous les gens de lettres lui rendent justice, et d'ailleurs sa plus grande punition est d'être oublié.'
“He proves that Jean Jacques is a master fool, and an ingrate kneaded by the stupidest vanity; but I don’t think these are the kind of truths that need to be published; things have to be either more amusing or interesting than this for them to be mixed up in the newspapers. … I think that the news of this quarrel will only serve to make philosophy look bad. I would have given a good part of my property to have made Rousseau a wise man; but it isn’t in his nature; you can’t make an eagle out of butterfly. It is enough, I think, that all the gens de letters think that Hume is right. Besides, Rousseau’s greatest punishment will be to be forgotten.”
Monday, May 29, 2006
bellarchy
These are the times that try a Painite’s soul – especially with the terrible threat, looming just off the horizon, of a book on Tom Paine coming out from C. Hitchens. Perhaps (oh, thin hope) Hitchens will find some way out of the corner his prose has painted him into – the grafting of Bungalow Bill hectoring upon the petrified mendacities of your average Fred Hiatt editorial. The style of Hitchens premiere jeunesse worked because it infused the sham Augustinianism one usually associates with Tories with a lefty attitude. Contrast, sometimes, is all. Although to be fair, there was also a carefulness in going about making a point, and a distinct negative capability, especially when he was writing about literature. Well, negative C. has been long trashed, and the spiral downwards has been encrusted with a variety of platitudinous insults launched at the left that Hitchens seems to have picked up for a song at some John Birch fire sale. The precipitous descent can be measured by comparing, for instance, the glorious demolition of Isaiah Berlin – what was that, around 1990? – with the beef and choler prosecution of Joseph Wilson, a sad soliloquy in the best Captain Bligh manner.
To be fair, the insults that have been returned, from the academic left, have been fixated upon Hitchens drunkenness. This, too, is sad – all too often the academic left, like your average parole officer, is foursquare against smoking, drinking, doing drugs or shooting firearms. To which LI can only say: fuck you. (Although, less self righteously, LI might have indulged in a few drinking comments ourselves in 2003. But then we stopped.)
Now is the time to pre-empt the capturing of Tom Paine and the dragging him about as the great grand Godfather of neo-conservatism in some shabby triumph through the pages of the Weekly Standard. This isn’t to deny that there are traces, in Paine’s life, of an interventionist mindset. At one point, he did advise Napoleon to invade England. It was the same craziness that made Karl Marx, latter, criticize the historical views of German nationalists for hailing resistance to Napoleon instead of seeing in that resistance the reactionary impulses of which it was composed. Paine, in other words, sometimes thought conquest, in the service of liberty, was a good thing. But the deeper strain in the writing is against it. Paine was well aware of the contradiction between Republicanism and war. One simply has to fish the dialectic out of the supposedly now obsolete polemic against monarchy and inherited privilege. To paraphrase Randolph Bourne, Paine saw that war was the health of the monarchy.
Unfortunately, political philosophers rarely seem to understand war as an institution. Rather, it is looked upon as an accident, at best a derivative of other state interests. The state, after all, in classical theory, is the opposite of war – the essential curb on it. Thus it seems dialectically out of the question that war might become part of the state, colonize the state’s DNA, as it were, determine its political form (a possibility materialized in the way a state taxes and distributes money, in the way a governing elite gets its hands on the state, in the very culture of belligerence that the busy little state spreads among a population).It is as if, among possible state forms, one is missing. Democracy, monarchy, oligarchy, anarchy – all of them are there except for… bellarchy.
Bellarchy, in premodern times, impressed itself on the core of the state in terms of conquest, plunder, and glory. It, of course, existed – from the Assyrians to the colonizing West – but these things seem alien to the state in any of its modern guises. In modern times, it was Hitler who codified the arms race and perpetual readiness for war into the state’s answer to the numerous problems posed by the treadmill of production. After World War II, this was Hitler’s legacy to the two great superpowers, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. So, for instance, the U.S. was able, in the Cold war, to do what it had been unable to do for almost one hundred years – develop the South, using the military to distribute aid to that underdeveloped part of the country, just as it also did to the West. And that structure has had cultural effects we have seen to this day. A constituency for war has been created such that war unleashes, without any questioning, the massive resources of the state.
If Paine never quite foresaw this system, he certainly knew of and derided the connection between war and monarchy – or, if you will, the executive branch. Here he is still very much the prophet – meaning that his words are still not taken seriously. Only when prophecy is safely defunct is the prophet honored, which is why we dread the honor about to be done to his scattered bones by enlisting him to fight in the mock war against Islamofascism, that counterfeit ideology. In the next post, we will outline Paine’s thoughts about war.
PS -- The war state suns itself every day in the newspapers, so there is no need to say here it is or here it is. Nevertheless, readers are urged to look at this story in the NYT in which the Department of War, as is its habit, urges the acquisition of an unnecessary weapon to augment America's 'pre-emptive' capability:
"The program to develop a conventional version of the Trident II missile was foreshadowed in the Nuclear Posture Review, a classified study the Pentagon carried out in 2001. The study urged that nonnuclear systems be added to the existing triad of long-range nuclear air, land and sea forces — a concept that the military nicknamed "Global Strike."
The Strategic Command, which oversees the long-range nuclear weapons in the United States arsenal, was given the responsibility to figure out a way to develop such a capability. In 2004, General Cartwright, a Marine officer, was appointed to head the command.
In looking for a new weapon, General Cartwright said, his goal was a nonnuclear system that could respond to a threat in no more than an hour, including the time that would be needed to secure the president's authorization to attack."
See, we only, only ever, really, respond to threats. Like the world's largest paranoiac, we would be peaceful as pie, we would sit still in our chairs like the guy at the end of Psycho, we wouldn't hurt a fly, if we didn't have to respond to all these threats. They keep coming in. They fill the air. They buzz around. We just have to respond to them! again and again, tearing aside the shower curtain, striking out with our nonnuclear tips, again and again and again, to the background music provided by Bernard Herrmann.
To be fair, the insults that have been returned, from the academic left, have been fixated upon Hitchens drunkenness. This, too, is sad – all too often the academic left, like your average parole officer, is foursquare against smoking, drinking, doing drugs or shooting firearms. To which LI can only say: fuck you. (Although, less self righteously, LI might have indulged in a few drinking comments ourselves in 2003. But then we stopped.)
Now is the time to pre-empt the capturing of Tom Paine and the dragging him about as the great grand Godfather of neo-conservatism in some shabby triumph through the pages of the Weekly Standard. This isn’t to deny that there are traces, in Paine’s life, of an interventionist mindset. At one point, he did advise Napoleon to invade England. It was the same craziness that made Karl Marx, latter, criticize the historical views of German nationalists for hailing resistance to Napoleon instead of seeing in that resistance the reactionary impulses of which it was composed. Paine, in other words, sometimes thought conquest, in the service of liberty, was a good thing. But the deeper strain in the writing is against it. Paine was well aware of the contradiction between Republicanism and war. One simply has to fish the dialectic out of the supposedly now obsolete polemic against monarchy and inherited privilege. To paraphrase Randolph Bourne, Paine saw that war was the health of the monarchy.
Unfortunately, political philosophers rarely seem to understand war as an institution. Rather, it is looked upon as an accident, at best a derivative of other state interests. The state, after all, in classical theory, is the opposite of war – the essential curb on it. Thus it seems dialectically out of the question that war might become part of the state, colonize the state’s DNA, as it were, determine its political form (a possibility materialized in the way a state taxes and distributes money, in the way a governing elite gets its hands on the state, in the very culture of belligerence that the busy little state spreads among a population).It is as if, among possible state forms, one is missing. Democracy, monarchy, oligarchy, anarchy – all of them are there except for… bellarchy.
Bellarchy, in premodern times, impressed itself on the core of the state in terms of conquest, plunder, and glory. It, of course, existed – from the Assyrians to the colonizing West – but these things seem alien to the state in any of its modern guises. In modern times, it was Hitler who codified the arms race and perpetual readiness for war into the state’s answer to the numerous problems posed by the treadmill of production. After World War II, this was Hitler’s legacy to the two great superpowers, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. So, for instance, the U.S. was able, in the Cold war, to do what it had been unable to do for almost one hundred years – develop the South, using the military to distribute aid to that underdeveloped part of the country, just as it also did to the West. And that structure has had cultural effects we have seen to this day. A constituency for war has been created such that war unleashes, without any questioning, the massive resources of the state.
If Paine never quite foresaw this system, he certainly knew of and derided the connection between war and monarchy – or, if you will, the executive branch. Here he is still very much the prophet – meaning that his words are still not taken seriously. Only when prophecy is safely defunct is the prophet honored, which is why we dread the honor about to be done to his scattered bones by enlisting him to fight in the mock war against Islamofascism, that counterfeit ideology. In the next post, we will outline Paine’s thoughts about war.
PS -- The war state suns itself every day in the newspapers, so there is no need to say here it is or here it is. Nevertheless, readers are urged to look at this story in the NYT in which the Department of War, as is its habit, urges the acquisition of an unnecessary weapon to augment America's 'pre-emptive' capability:
"The program to develop a conventional version of the Trident II missile was foreshadowed in the Nuclear Posture Review, a classified study the Pentagon carried out in 2001. The study urged that nonnuclear systems be added to the existing triad of long-range nuclear air, land and sea forces — a concept that the military nicknamed "Global Strike."
The Strategic Command, which oversees the long-range nuclear weapons in the United States arsenal, was given the responsibility to figure out a way to develop such a capability. In 2004, General Cartwright, a Marine officer, was appointed to head the command.
In looking for a new weapon, General Cartwright said, his goal was a nonnuclear system that could respond to a threat in no more than an hour, including the time that would be needed to secure the president's authorization to attack."
See, we only, only ever, really, respond to threats. Like the world's largest paranoiac, we would be peaceful as pie, we would sit still in our chairs like the guy at the end of Psycho, we wouldn't hurt a fly, if we didn't have to respond to all these threats. They keep coming in. They fill the air. They buzz around. We just have to respond to them! again and again, tearing aside the shower curtain, striking out with our nonnuclear tips, again and again and again, to the background music provided by Bernard Herrmann.
Saturday, May 27, 2006
fiction, fact, and seediness
Ah, the Bush administration, always in lockstep with the most villainous forces in America. Today’s NYT story relates a typical Bush caper, half Penguin from Batman, half Satan from Revelations. In the face of global warming, the Bushies are pushing to increase dramatically the amount of greenhouse gases Americans release into the atmosphere – by burning coal. The back to coal movement, and back to the dirtiest methods of mining it and using it, gives us some startling grafs:
“While Peabody supports some coal gasification projects, it remains skeptical about departing from traditional coal-burning methods to produce electricity.
The pulverized coal plants it wants to build, which grind coal into a dust before burning it to make electricity, currently cost about $2 billion each, or 15 percent to 20 percent less to build than the cleaner "integrated gasification combined cycle," or I.G.C.C., plants, which convert coal into a gas.
The hope among scientists is that I.G.C.C. plants could be relatively quickly fitted with systems to sequester deep underground the carbon dioxide created from making electricity. Without such controls, the new coal plants under development worldwide could pump as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over their lifetimes as all the coal burned in the last 250 years, according to Jeff Goodell, who has written on coal for several publications, including The New York Times, and is author of a new book on the coal industry.”
The leader of the coal industry is the villain in that old John Prine song, the Peabody Coal company:
"But while sooty smokestacks are no longer a big problem in modern coal-burning power plants, the increase in global warming gases is. A typical 500-megawatt coal-fired electricity plant, supplying enough power to run roughly 500,000 homes, alone produces as much in emissions annually as about 750,000 cars, according to estimates from Royal Dutch Shell.
"Coal has perhaps no stronger evangelist than Mr. Boyce, [President of Peabody] who grew up on Long Island, the son of a mining executive, and studied engineering in Arizona. He argues that a way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions can be found without having to switch from the existing cheaper coal-burning technology.
Much in the way that Exxon Mobil influences discussion of climate issues from the petroleum industry, Peabody is a backer of industry-supported organizations that seek to prevent mandatory reductions in global warming emissions and promote demand for coal.
Peabody's executives are also by far the coal industry's largest political contributors to federal candidates and parties, giving $641,059 in the 2004 election cycle, with 93 percent of that amount going to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, an independent research group in Washington that tracks money in politics. “
So, to recapitulate: the Bush administration's response to global warming is to encourage, in its own modest way, putting more Greenhouse gases into the atmosphere with less government regulation. The problem here, as so often in the past six years, is that the very scale and audacity of this obviously wrongheaded, vile, corrupt and anti-human attitude leaves its opponents gasping for negative superlatives, for some verbal equivalent to the punches continually given to common sense and honesty. The immediate need for an insult is not a position that allows for critical thinking. In truth, the Bush presidency isn't the most wicked or the worst to ever grace these here states -- surely that position belongs to Eisenhower, a president who repeatedly and carelessly risked nuclear war. But it is by far the seediest. Our present discontents, in which vanity projects become war and cronyism becomes an energy policy, reminds me of this passage in Marina Warner's fine essay, 'Angels and Engines' on Revelations in last Fall's Raritan:
"The wars of our time, represented in highly popular story cycles, are not easy to keep apart in the mind's eye from the wars conducted in reality and on news channels, and this is not just because The Lord ofthe Rings, Star Wars, the Chronicles of Namia,and the Harry Potter series are modern allegories. A recent poll
found that a terrifying number of people in the United Kingdom thought Hitler was a figment and that the ores' defeat at Helms Deep in The Two Towers actually took place (not to mention the headline interest of newspapers in the last episode of Friends). The reasons for this confusion lie deep: language and imagination govern ways of thinking, and from that work of cognition issue ways of doing. Brilliant techniques of illusion propel fantasies into reality. Film fictions have weirdly fiipped over and, in so doing, fulfilled aspects of apocalyptic prophecy at its most obscurantist. In some ways those informants who thought the battle of Helms Deep took place were right: it did take place—in the filming of the movie."
“While Peabody supports some coal gasification projects, it remains skeptical about departing from traditional coal-burning methods to produce electricity.
The pulverized coal plants it wants to build, which grind coal into a dust before burning it to make electricity, currently cost about $2 billion each, or 15 percent to 20 percent less to build than the cleaner "integrated gasification combined cycle," or I.G.C.C., plants, which convert coal into a gas.
The hope among scientists is that I.G.C.C. plants could be relatively quickly fitted with systems to sequester deep underground the carbon dioxide created from making electricity. Without such controls, the new coal plants under development worldwide could pump as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over their lifetimes as all the coal burned in the last 250 years, according to Jeff Goodell, who has written on coal for several publications, including The New York Times, and is author of a new book on the coal industry.”
The leader of the coal industry is the villain in that old John Prine song, the Peabody Coal company:
"But while sooty smokestacks are no longer a big problem in modern coal-burning power plants, the increase in global warming gases is. A typical 500-megawatt coal-fired electricity plant, supplying enough power to run roughly 500,000 homes, alone produces as much in emissions annually as about 750,000 cars, according to estimates from Royal Dutch Shell.
"Coal has perhaps no stronger evangelist than Mr. Boyce, [President of Peabody] who grew up on Long Island, the son of a mining executive, and studied engineering in Arizona. He argues that a way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions can be found without having to switch from the existing cheaper coal-burning technology.
Much in the way that Exxon Mobil influences discussion of climate issues from the petroleum industry, Peabody is a backer of industry-supported organizations that seek to prevent mandatory reductions in global warming emissions and promote demand for coal.
Peabody's executives are also by far the coal industry's largest political contributors to federal candidates and parties, giving $641,059 in the 2004 election cycle, with 93 percent of that amount going to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, an independent research group in Washington that tracks money in politics. “
So, to recapitulate: the Bush administration's response to global warming is to encourage, in its own modest way, putting more Greenhouse gases into the atmosphere with less government regulation. The problem here, as so often in the past six years, is that the very scale and audacity of this obviously wrongheaded, vile, corrupt and anti-human attitude leaves its opponents gasping for negative superlatives, for some verbal equivalent to the punches continually given to common sense and honesty. The immediate need for an insult is not a position that allows for critical thinking. In truth, the Bush presidency isn't the most wicked or the worst to ever grace these here states -- surely that position belongs to Eisenhower, a president who repeatedly and carelessly risked nuclear war. But it is by far the seediest. Our present discontents, in which vanity projects become war and cronyism becomes an energy policy, reminds me of this passage in Marina Warner's fine essay, 'Angels and Engines' on Revelations in last Fall's Raritan:
"The wars of our time, represented in highly popular story cycles, are not easy to keep apart in the mind's eye from the wars conducted in reality and on news channels, and this is not just because The Lord ofthe Rings, Star Wars, the Chronicles of Namia,and the Harry Potter series are modern allegories. A recent poll
found that a terrifying number of people in the United Kingdom thought Hitler was a figment and that the ores' defeat at Helms Deep in The Two Towers actually took place (not to mention the headline interest of newspapers in the last episode of Friends). The reasons for this confusion lie deep: language and imagination govern ways of thinking, and from that work of cognition issue ways of doing. Brilliant techniques of illusion propel fantasies into reality. Film fictions have weirdly fiipped over and, in so doing, fulfilled aspects of apocalyptic prophecy at its most obscurantist. In some ways those informants who thought the battle of Helms Deep took place were right: it did take place—in the filming of the movie."
Friday, May 26, 2006
skepticism and science
- From the American Scientist. Click on image to zoom it.
To continue with LI’s anti-military rant from yesterday – Harper’s this month has a fine article on nuclear testing in Nevada by David Samuels. Rumsfeld, who is a monster from outer space, wants to resume underground testing of nuclear bombs. Here are a few grafs from Samuels piece:
“Over the life of the American nuclear-design program, the scientists at Los Alamos and Livermore designed 71 different warheads for 116 nuclear-weapons systems, at a total cost of nearly $800 billion. This year, the Department of Energy will spend $6.5 billion on nuclear weapons, and it plans to spend a total of $35 billion over the following four years, an amount that in real dollars equals what Ronald Reagan spent in eight years on nuclear weapons at the height of the Cold War.
…
"The last time we did a test there was nothing over fifteen stories in Las Vegas," he reflects. But with the revitalized plutonium-pit production scheduled for 2007, a multibillion-dollar tritium-production program funded by Congress, deliveries of refurbished nuclear weapons scheduled for 2006, and billions of dollars earmarked for the computers and visualization theaters at Livermore and Los Alamos, it is impossible to ignore what's in the offing. Both Stephen Younger, the former associate director of the weapons program at Los Alamos, and C. Paul Robinson, the current director of Sandia, have publicly advocated the development of a new generation of strategic nukes. As the Defense Department's Nuclear Posture Review explained to Congress at the beginning of 2002, "While the United States is making every effort to maintain the stockpile without additional nuclear testing, this may not be possible for the indefinite future."”
LI often gets irritated at the peasant stubbornness or pig ignorance of people who doubt that global warming is happening, or doubt evolutionary theory, etc., etc. We shouldn’t – there are good reasons for the average person to think for him or herself about the pronouncements of the scientists. A great example of scientists, en masse, lying, is given to us by the above ground nuclear testing that went on for decades in Nevada.
In David Thompson’s book, “In Nevada: The Land, The People, God, and Chance," there’s a movie anecdote – which you would expect, since Thompson is a movie critic and the one man author of a movie encyclopedia – about The Conqueror, a John Wayne flick financed by Howard Hughes and shot in St. George, Utah in 1955. St. George happened to be in the alley through which mucho radioactivity from those above ground tests passed. Hughes had soil dug up form the site to be used later for in studio productionAnd the crew, cast, director and others were thus exposed to the substances unleashed by the department of War and blessed by the scientists hired by the department of war, who have, since the dropping of Big Boy, spent seventy years downplaying the dangers of radiation. Thompson points out that, out of the 221 people working on the film, 91 got cancer. This isn’t that surprising. In St. George, deformed babies became known as sacrifice babies – sacrificed to national defense. The leukemia rate was 2.5 times higher than the national average – but cancers were only one of the kind of low grade, life sucking maladies that afflicted the community, and that atomic energy scientists are quick to label psychosomatic – as in the recent WHO/AEIC report on Chernobyl. During a period from the late 40s to the late 70s, the War Department’s scientific community was both experimenting with weapons designed to kill millions and denying that the weapons produced anything that would harm Americans living around the places where those weapons were exploded. Sometimes, just to check, populations were exposed to radiation on purpose – the Defense Department in 1991 admitted that it had done about 4,000 experiments exposing humans to radioactivity between 1944 to 1974, according to Eduardo Goncalves article on the ‘secret nuclear war’ in the Ecologist in 2001. Carole Gallagher, in her photo book about the victims of the bomb tests, quotes a great AEC memo about communities in the path of fallout – they were labeled the “low use segment of the population.” The Conqueror was the more unfortunate in that it mixed low use people with valuable people, including John Wayne – who of course died of cancer. As any scientist would be quick to point out, John Wayne smoked. In any population in the fifties, there are going to be people who die of cancer anyway, statistically. It isn’t science to hide behind that fact, it is politics. But the War Department’s scientists hid behind that fact for fifty years. In Goncalves article, he quotes an Army medic, Van Brandon, who said that the army routinely kept two sets of records of radioactive readings in the fallout paths, one set to show that nobody received an elevated level of radiation, the other set to show how high that elevated level actually was. “That set was brought in a locked briefcase every morning.”
In the 50s, to be fair, not a lot was known about chronic illness. It certainly wasn’t known that one could be infected with a disease that would only appear thirty years later. Now it is fifty years later, and there is a lot of information that is not going to be showing up in any newspaper headlines any time soon – after all, the congressional investigations about the nuclear testing ‘accidents’ were concluded in the 80s. News and disease have a different time frame. So we haven’t seen a lot of publicity given to this report by Steven L. Simon, Andre Bouville and Charles E. Land in this January’s American Scientist, "Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Tests and Cancer Risks." Yet there should be, not only for what it says but for what it doesn't say. The report goes the partial hang-out route, to quote Nixon, diminishing by segregating -- for instance, by concentrating on cancer, the authors can ignore the immune system breakdowns associated with radioactivity, and never ask if there is any meshing between these two results of radiation poisoning. It bases its statistics on reports of radioactive readings after the tests without even a note to say that some of those readings are, to say the least, disputed – and that we know the Department of War has changed its story about certain of the most notorious tests -- for instance the one on July 5, 1957, in which, in the immediate aftermath of the test, some 2,000 soldiers were ordered into ground zero – while the becqueral count was off the Geiger counter - and this was after these soldiers were exposed, as was standard practice, by being put in trenches some mile from the explosion. Afterwards, soldiers reported that they could do things you only see in horror movies – like pull their teeth from their mouth. All of which reports would get them trundled into the psych wards are VA hospitals. And none of which is reflected in the notes in the American Scientist, which are enlivened by some maps I'd like to figure out how to post.
This is from the article:
"The cancer risks are, of course, the most publicized of the spectrum of ills resulting from scientific carelessness about exploding big dangerous toys to see what would happen. The less publicized of those ills is immune deficiencies of various kinds.
“In 1997, NCI conducted a detailed evaluation of dose to the thyroid glands of U,S, residents from 1-131 in fallout from tests in Nevada. In a related activity, we evaluated the risks of thyroid cancer from that exposure and estimated that about 49,000 fallout-related cases might occur in the United States,
almost all of them among persons who were under age 20 at some time during the period 1951-57, with 95-percent uncertainty limits of 11,300 and 212,000. The estimated risk may be compared with some 400,000 lifetime thyroid cancers expected in the same population in the absence of any fallout exposure.
Accounting for thyroid exposure from global fallout, which was distributed fairly uniformly over the entire United States, might increase the estimated excess by 10 percent, from 49,000 to 54,000. Fallout-related risks for thyroid cancer are likely to exceed those for any other cancer simply because those risks
are predominantly ascribable to the thyroid dose from internal radiatition, which is unmatched in other organs.”
The ever helpful government has set up a website, by the way, if you want to estimate your risk of thyroid cancer from fallout. It is at this link
However, can you believe the gov? LI is going with this editorial from the St. Georges Newspaper from May 13, 2006:
“Another part of the report states that breathing or swallowing radioactive iodine originating in contaminated milk was the most significant pathway to radioactive exposure.
Yet a third part of the report concludes that there are "substantial gaps in existing data and other factors" related to the research.
In summary, however, the NAS report recommends that the number of diseases compensated by the federal government should not be expanded beyond the current 18, but that the Centers for Disease Control and the National Cancer Institute should complete national dose estimates for all fallout radioactivity, not just Iodine 131, that fell, according to the report, on every county in the nation.
The NCI has already determined that there are as many as 212,000 cases of thyroid cancer that could have been caused by fallout exposure. No number is pegged to the 17 other types of cancer that currently qualify for compensation, although the NCI also recently released a study about the number and types of cancer found in the Marshall Islands where 66 nuclear weapons were detonated from 1946-1958. According to the NCI, 530 different cancers were caused by that fallout.
And although the U.S. Senate, when it approved the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act in 1990, concluded that such radionuclides as Cesium 137 and Strontium 90 are responsible for some of the illnesses, the report failed to offer any significant information regarding the effects of those elements.
The recent NAS report was issued, coincidentally, on the same day that the White House reasserted its commitment to research on a new generation of nuclear weapons - the so-called bunker buster bombs - and one day after the National Research Council concluded that these new weapons would not be any safer than the current nuclear arsenal and expose millions to radiation.
In essence, what the NAS report does is buy time for the government and time is not a commodity the people who call themselves downwinders - those who suffered illness as a result of nuclear fallout - have.
The longer the government takes to determine the effects of spraying countless Americans with poisonous fallout, the fewer survivors there will be to compensate for their sacrifice.
The longer the government can stall on offering more information about the effects of radiation poisoning, the farther along the research and testing of this needless next generation of nukes is allowed to progress.
The NAS report is nothing more than a smokescreen to cover the tracks of the government for killing thousands of innocent victims and paving the way for more of the same in the future.
It's time for the people of this country to stand up and demand some answers before it's too late.”
Let’s end this uber depressing post with a quote from an Oak Ridge Physician famous for fighting against the government habit of poisoning the population, Karl Z. Morgan, who testified in the Silkwood case.
This attitude [for radiation safety] did not prevail, apparently, at some other places [other than Oak Ridge.] Certainly it did not at Three Mile Island. Since I left the faculty at Georgia Tech, I've testified in over a hundred-fifty cases, trying to help people that have allegedly been injured by radiation. We won the Karen Silkwood case and Crumbeck case, and I was a sole witness [for the plaintiff when] we won in the Three Mile Island class-action suit.
But in most other cases, the AEC and DOE [have] called—[what was] then the Department of Justice [(DOJ)]; let me call it the "Department of Injustice" [to make false claims about radiation exposure] under some of the people there. They [(the DOJ employees)] actually bragged about the fact that they set up courses to train health physicists and lawyers on how to keep injured parties, injured from radiation, from getting any benefits! One of these was even held in Washington. I didn't attend it, but I can point to some people that attended the lecture that [Don] Jose from the Justice Department gave. Imagine: the Department of Justice—which is supposed, according to our Constitution, to provide justice to the citizen—training lawyers and health physicists how to cheat the public! How to allow people to be used as guinea pigs rather than be a hindrance to some nuclear or military program!”
Thursday, May 25, 2006
those chains aren't dissolving fast enough
When I look into history and see the multitudes of men, otherwise virtuous, who have died, and their families been ruined, in the defence of knaves and fools, and which they would not have done, had they reasoned at all upon the system; I do not know a greater good that an individual can render to mankind, than to endeavour to break the chains of political superstition. Those chains are now dissolving fast, and proclamations and persecutions will serve but to hasten that dissolution. – Thomas Paine
The AEI is a national treasure. As some will remember, it was the AEI who sent the eagle eyed Ken Zinsmeister to Iraq in April of 2005, and his results were summed up in the title of the article he wrote: The War is Over, and We Won.
It is this uncanny ability to find the story that others miss, and to make the hard, hard proposals that makes AEI a factory of opeds for places like the Washington Post. As is well known, editor Fred Hiatt is fatally attracted to the movers and shakers of the terrifyingly brainy inner court around our very own Good Leaker, POTUS extraordinaire, with their high idealism about putting freedom first around the world -- for which cause they are willing to sacrifice any amount of freedom in these here States.
Which is why this counter-intuitive, excellent op ed by Dan Blumenthal should get the ball rolling. Having won the war in Iraq, and making this economy sing, we need level headed people to patrol the precincts of paradise and run back to us screaming, Danger, Danger when they see Danger. And Blumenthal fills that task by spotting one of America’s biggest problems: we are not spending enough on the military.
It is scandalous. It turns out we are seriously underfunding the forces we will need to bomb China to fuck. Little tears, red white and blue ones, leaked from LI’s peepers as we read:
“The latest Quadrennial Defense Review states that China "has the greatest potential to compete militarily with the United States." The Pentagon seeks to "shape [China's] strategic choices" and to "dissuade any military competitor from developing disruptive or other capabilities that could enable regional hegemony." The Bush administration has taken some concrete action toward these ends. An upgraded alliance with Japan will improve our deterrent posture. The opening of a strategic relationship with India reflects in part an American desire to ensure that China does not gain hegemony over South or Central Asia. An increase in the size of the U.S. Navy's attack submarine fleet in Guam also brings more American capability into the Pacific. A nascent defense relationship with Vietnam may over time provide the American military with what it needs most in Asia -- more bases.
But our China policy leaves us a day late and a dollar short when it comes to the challenge posed by the speed of Beijing's military buildup. We still have restrictions on relations with Taiwan dating to the Carter era that make the island more difficult to defend. A stronger commitment by the Pentagon to developing long-range surveillance and strike capabilities would make Beijing less confident that it could use its vast territory as a sanctuary for its missile and other "disruptive" forces. Upgrading our undersea warfare capabilities will improve our regional freedom of action.”
LI has a few disagreements. For instance, we think we should gut the Department of War, destroy all of our missiles, shrink our navy by half, and take that money that doesn’t go to support Veterans benefits and devote it to investment into greening our infrastructure. We should simply give up on trying to be the world’s supreme military power. Completely. And we should pay no attention to China’s military whatsoever, but ask ourselves about using our own territory as a sanctuary for disruptive forces. We should downgrade our undersea warfare capability so radically that future generations will marvel that we ever spent money launching the useless, rusting flotillas we can, perhaps, display in various seaside parks.
Not that we do not appreciate the AEI’s absolute vigilance, putting the interest of Defense Industries before everything else on the planet. The A stands, for those in the know, for Alien. And special thanks from LI to WAPO for its endless willingness to make its editorial pages a soapbox for the rants of any and every two penny hawk to come down the pike. If you froth at the mouth, if you want to nuke Iran, if you consider Chavez a dictator and Iraq the free-est country in the Middle East, come on down – the WAPO editorial page has kept open a special place for you.
After you’ve treated yourself to the Blumenthal op ed, the second funniest piece on the web, at the moment – via Crooked Timber – is the Squirrel Leadership Council page, which declares the Euston Manifesto a hopeful sign that the European left is moving away from knee jerk Anti-Americanism. Surely the best thing about the piece is this sentence. Can self parody get any richer?
“It is, of course, an article of faith among Europe's lefties that America is a cultural and intellectual wasteland. But this, too, is beginning to change. A stream of Europeans passing through Washington this spring expressed surprise at the quality and variety of the debate in the city's dynamic think tanks.”
The land of dynamic think tanks. This is the true voice of a court society so sunk in the narcissistic stupor of admiring its face in the mirror that surely, as in all fairy tales, the time is coming when that mirror will tell the truth -- the dyanmic think tanks aren't the fairest in the land. They stink up the city. They are a pest and a menace, compounded out of an ambitious, unscrupulous lot of pecksniffs whose collective advice leads invariably to public disaster and the aggrandizement of their own private interests, giving them a relationship to this country much like the one between plasmodium falciparum and the anopheles moquitoes.
The AEI is a national treasure. As some will remember, it was the AEI who sent the eagle eyed Ken Zinsmeister to Iraq in April of 2005, and his results were summed up in the title of the article he wrote: The War is Over, and We Won.
It is this uncanny ability to find the story that others miss, and to make the hard, hard proposals that makes AEI a factory of opeds for places like the Washington Post. As is well known, editor Fred Hiatt is fatally attracted to the movers and shakers of the terrifyingly brainy inner court around our very own Good Leaker, POTUS extraordinaire, with their high idealism about putting freedom first around the world -- for which cause they are willing to sacrifice any amount of freedom in these here States.
Which is why this counter-intuitive, excellent op ed by Dan Blumenthal should get the ball rolling. Having won the war in Iraq, and making this economy sing, we need level headed people to patrol the precincts of paradise and run back to us screaming, Danger, Danger when they see Danger. And Blumenthal fills that task by spotting one of America’s biggest problems: we are not spending enough on the military.
It is scandalous. It turns out we are seriously underfunding the forces we will need to bomb China to fuck. Little tears, red white and blue ones, leaked from LI’s peepers as we read:
“The latest Quadrennial Defense Review states that China "has the greatest potential to compete militarily with the United States." The Pentagon seeks to "shape [China's] strategic choices" and to "dissuade any military competitor from developing disruptive or other capabilities that could enable regional hegemony." The Bush administration has taken some concrete action toward these ends. An upgraded alliance with Japan will improve our deterrent posture. The opening of a strategic relationship with India reflects in part an American desire to ensure that China does not gain hegemony over South or Central Asia. An increase in the size of the U.S. Navy's attack submarine fleet in Guam also brings more American capability into the Pacific. A nascent defense relationship with Vietnam may over time provide the American military with what it needs most in Asia -- more bases.
But our China policy leaves us a day late and a dollar short when it comes to the challenge posed by the speed of Beijing's military buildup. We still have restrictions on relations with Taiwan dating to the Carter era that make the island more difficult to defend. A stronger commitment by the Pentagon to developing long-range surveillance and strike capabilities would make Beijing less confident that it could use its vast territory as a sanctuary for its missile and other "disruptive" forces. Upgrading our undersea warfare capabilities will improve our regional freedom of action.”
LI has a few disagreements. For instance, we think we should gut the Department of War, destroy all of our missiles, shrink our navy by half, and take that money that doesn’t go to support Veterans benefits and devote it to investment into greening our infrastructure. We should simply give up on trying to be the world’s supreme military power. Completely. And we should pay no attention to China’s military whatsoever, but ask ourselves about using our own territory as a sanctuary for disruptive forces. We should downgrade our undersea warfare capability so radically that future generations will marvel that we ever spent money launching the useless, rusting flotillas we can, perhaps, display in various seaside parks.
Not that we do not appreciate the AEI’s absolute vigilance, putting the interest of Defense Industries before everything else on the planet. The A stands, for those in the know, for Alien. And special thanks from LI to WAPO for its endless willingness to make its editorial pages a soapbox for the rants of any and every two penny hawk to come down the pike. If you froth at the mouth, if you want to nuke Iran, if you consider Chavez a dictator and Iraq the free-est country in the Middle East, come on down – the WAPO editorial page has kept open a special place for you.
After you’ve treated yourself to the Blumenthal op ed, the second funniest piece on the web, at the moment – via Crooked Timber – is the Squirrel Leadership Council page, which declares the Euston Manifesto a hopeful sign that the European left is moving away from knee jerk Anti-Americanism. Surely the best thing about the piece is this sentence. Can self parody get any richer?
“It is, of course, an article of faith among Europe's lefties that America is a cultural and intellectual wasteland. But this, too, is beginning to change. A stream of Europeans passing through Washington this spring expressed surprise at the quality and variety of the debate in the city's dynamic think tanks.”
The land of dynamic think tanks. This is the true voice of a court society so sunk in the narcissistic stupor of admiring its face in the mirror that surely, as in all fairy tales, the time is coming when that mirror will tell the truth -- the dyanmic think tanks aren't the fairest in the land. They stink up the city. They are a pest and a menace, compounded out of an ambitious, unscrupulous lot of pecksniffs whose collective advice leads invariably to public disaster and the aggrandizement of their own private interests, giving them a relationship to this country much like the one between plasmodium falciparum and the anopheles moquitoes.
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
turns 2
When the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen came out, a few years ago, I did not know that – as the man who raised me from a pup, David, told me when I was talking to him about this the other day – ‘everybody knew that movie was rank. Where were you – wanking off?’ Somehow I missed the supreme judgment of the masses. Somehow, I missed the whole movie. But, as I stumbled upon it in my innocence last week and saw an hour of it, which makes me an expert about the wretched thing. And … more than that … I have seen other action films. LI’s analysis of the hunter narrative in the Turns post is supposed to set this here post up, so I am going to pretend my reader has read it.
Okay? Remember my brilliant and never to be forgotten point about the hunter as the hero of methodological individualism? Are you ready for an insight that will surely blow you out of your shoes?
Methodological individualism is deader than a dodo. Or, rather, the myth marches on, but the country of individualism, these here states, where the myth’s pedal met the metal, has long gone past the form of capitalism in which the individual made a plausible hero. This is a stockholder, stakeholder country, an absentee ownership country, a guarantor country. And, even as the guarantor structures buckles under the weight of the succession of monsters that fill up the places in the governing class and mistake their infinitely coddled trajectories for the ruggedest blazing through the meritocratic jungle, little Indiana Joneses every one, we have created (and it is a we – action movies negate and take a big dump on the very notion of auteur) the action movie in which our template hunter is degraded into a mere employee, a hired gun, while the only entrepreneur in the landscape, the last individual embodying methodological individualism, is… the bad guy. The bad guy, one notices, actually does things like manufacture the explosives he uses. Goes out and kidnaps some scientists. And, in a moment that is both sweetly anachronistic and always undoes him, actually participates in the work of the organization. And so it is with the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Our bad guy is named the Phantom, although he should have named himself One eyed Metal Mask, since he is anything but phantomic and he does wear a one eyed metal mask. The time is vaguely 1900-ish, and the premise is that this phantom is using modern weapons, such as haven’t been invented yet – like the tank – to create havoc and ultimately bring the nations of Europe into conflict with each other – with the aim of selling them the weapons. But though the man with the one eyed metal mask is supposed to be on the cutting edge and over, he is actually behind the curve in almost every scene in the movie. Instead of dispatching his troops to shoot up the league of e.g. – a group of action figures from literature who are supposed to prevent him from setting Europe at loggerheads with itself – he actually goes out to watch them. This, however, was the Golden age of Morgan, of trusts, of the retirement of all the old captains of industry, of the wonderful idea that ownership of an enterprise resides in certificates you buy in a market. That's why bad guys seem so Industrial revolutionish.
Meanwhile, we have our hunter – or hunters, in this case. The hunters, going back to those early James Bond flicks, are supremely taken care of. They are showered with things, and rarely threaten to go on strike for more pay. In fact, pay and a pension don’t enter into it, even as, in the serial, we watch them being replaced, one actor for another. And in this, Hollywood has dreamed a little dream for us – this is the dream of the Guarantor society, where the state, or the giant corporation, pays the bills. In fact, surely it is from the movies and this atmosphere of magic entitlement that the Lays, the Welches, the Scroochys got the idea that a company should not only pay you a salary fit for a conquering Moghul but also pay for your car fare, get you tickets to a ball game, and in general treat you like it was your own personal tooth fairy. In this atmosphere, the hunter’s whole ethos is bound to rapidly rot. And so it proves.
The symbol of that decay, I think, is the explosion. And, in general, the whole logic of aiming in the action movie. Here, the League of E.G. is typical. When we meet the hero, Alan Quartermain – Sean Connery – he is at a hunting club in Africa. He is attacked by a detachment of bad guys (miraculously unsupervised by the boss). They wield machine guns. Now, I used to think that the moral logic that was substituted for gravity in action movies – the miraculous ways bullets were continually fired at the hero, and he was continually destined to end happily – was all that this was about. And indeed, a man from five feet away shoots at the old Connery, who barely bends to evade the speeding projectiles – but one must remember that this movie sucks partly because it seems like a bad simulation of an action movie. It is this extra bit of contrivance that lets us watch it as though it were something naked, an anatomical model of action movies. Later in the movie, we see Connery himself practice shooting – he is quite the sharpshooter. But the movie shows his talent, and makes a parody of the danger posed to him by the shots of his enemies, merely to undermine the whole idea of aiming. The one thing that the hunter carries into the wilderness that is unique is that hand eye combination. It is unique because it is tailored to the instrument, which, in the days before uniform mass production, could have severe variances. So, yes, there is a moral subsystem directing the bullets, but more than that there is the abolition of the need for aiming both in the parody of who the bullets hit and in the gross enslavement to the higher explosive.
Action movies and action movie fans love explosives. Love cars that go boom, and buildings that are mined, and digital recreations of cities that are bombed. Why? Well, the enthusiasm on the part of the audience I am going to bracket, for the nonce. But the larger narrative meaning of the bomb is that here we have something which abolishes even the appearance of independence on the part of the hero. The larger the bomb, the more complex the delivery system, the more dependent the hero and the larger the swathe of destruction. That makes a mockery of the hand-eye system – it dialectically trumps it. To hit your prey with one shot is a sort of ethical gesture in the hunter narrative; to blow up a random assortment of things among which happens to be your prey is its opposite in the hunter narrative gone rotten. Usually, the anxiety about so radically destroying the very premises of the individualist hero is so intense that the bombing is attributed to the bad guy. And yet, in that shift, the bad guy still ends up as the last real capitalist hero – for unlike the hero/hunter, dependent on the guarantor state, the bad guy often actually fashions the bombs, or at least invests in the stock and personnel to manufacture them.
The narrative elements of the hunter story are in free fall in the action movie. The old dialectical moves turn into gags, and the heroes turn into stunt men accessories to the only thing that is left – the forest of f/x. But in this forest, one never feels the absence of the nymphs, of the spirit who has just departed before you – to use Ortega y Gasset’s thought. The nymphs were never here. The forest of f/x is a wormwood forest – irradiated, sterile, dying.
Okay? Remember my brilliant and never to be forgotten point about the hunter as the hero of methodological individualism? Are you ready for an insight that will surely blow you out of your shoes?
Methodological individualism is deader than a dodo. Or, rather, the myth marches on, but the country of individualism, these here states, where the myth’s pedal met the metal, has long gone past the form of capitalism in which the individual made a plausible hero. This is a stockholder, stakeholder country, an absentee ownership country, a guarantor country. And, even as the guarantor structures buckles under the weight of the succession of monsters that fill up the places in the governing class and mistake their infinitely coddled trajectories for the ruggedest blazing through the meritocratic jungle, little Indiana Joneses every one, we have created (and it is a we – action movies negate and take a big dump on the very notion of auteur) the action movie in which our template hunter is degraded into a mere employee, a hired gun, while the only entrepreneur in the landscape, the last individual embodying methodological individualism, is… the bad guy. The bad guy, one notices, actually does things like manufacture the explosives he uses. Goes out and kidnaps some scientists. And, in a moment that is both sweetly anachronistic and always undoes him, actually participates in the work of the organization. And so it is with the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Our bad guy is named the Phantom, although he should have named himself One eyed Metal Mask, since he is anything but phantomic and he does wear a one eyed metal mask. The time is vaguely 1900-ish, and the premise is that this phantom is using modern weapons, such as haven’t been invented yet – like the tank – to create havoc and ultimately bring the nations of Europe into conflict with each other – with the aim of selling them the weapons. But though the man with the one eyed metal mask is supposed to be on the cutting edge and over, he is actually behind the curve in almost every scene in the movie. Instead of dispatching his troops to shoot up the league of e.g. – a group of action figures from literature who are supposed to prevent him from setting Europe at loggerheads with itself – he actually goes out to watch them. This, however, was the Golden age of Morgan, of trusts, of the retirement of all the old captains of industry, of the wonderful idea that ownership of an enterprise resides in certificates you buy in a market. That's why bad guys seem so Industrial revolutionish.
Meanwhile, we have our hunter – or hunters, in this case. The hunters, going back to those early James Bond flicks, are supremely taken care of. They are showered with things, and rarely threaten to go on strike for more pay. In fact, pay and a pension don’t enter into it, even as, in the serial, we watch them being replaced, one actor for another. And in this, Hollywood has dreamed a little dream for us – this is the dream of the Guarantor society, where the state, or the giant corporation, pays the bills. In fact, surely it is from the movies and this atmosphere of magic entitlement that the Lays, the Welches, the Scroochys got the idea that a company should not only pay you a salary fit for a conquering Moghul but also pay for your car fare, get you tickets to a ball game, and in general treat you like it was your own personal tooth fairy. In this atmosphere, the hunter’s whole ethos is bound to rapidly rot. And so it proves.
The symbol of that decay, I think, is the explosion. And, in general, the whole logic of aiming in the action movie. Here, the League of E.G. is typical. When we meet the hero, Alan Quartermain – Sean Connery – he is at a hunting club in Africa. He is attacked by a detachment of bad guys (miraculously unsupervised by the boss). They wield machine guns. Now, I used to think that the moral logic that was substituted for gravity in action movies – the miraculous ways bullets were continually fired at the hero, and he was continually destined to end happily – was all that this was about. And indeed, a man from five feet away shoots at the old Connery, who barely bends to evade the speeding projectiles – but one must remember that this movie sucks partly because it seems like a bad simulation of an action movie. It is this extra bit of contrivance that lets us watch it as though it were something naked, an anatomical model of action movies. Later in the movie, we see Connery himself practice shooting – he is quite the sharpshooter. But the movie shows his talent, and makes a parody of the danger posed to him by the shots of his enemies, merely to undermine the whole idea of aiming. The one thing that the hunter carries into the wilderness that is unique is that hand eye combination. It is unique because it is tailored to the instrument, which, in the days before uniform mass production, could have severe variances. So, yes, there is a moral subsystem directing the bullets, but more than that there is the abolition of the need for aiming both in the parody of who the bullets hit and in the gross enslavement to the higher explosive.
Action movies and action movie fans love explosives. Love cars that go boom, and buildings that are mined, and digital recreations of cities that are bombed. Why? Well, the enthusiasm on the part of the audience I am going to bracket, for the nonce. But the larger narrative meaning of the bomb is that here we have something which abolishes even the appearance of independence on the part of the hero. The larger the bomb, the more complex the delivery system, the more dependent the hero and the larger the swathe of destruction. That makes a mockery of the hand-eye system – it dialectically trumps it. To hit your prey with one shot is a sort of ethical gesture in the hunter narrative; to blow up a random assortment of things among which happens to be your prey is its opposite in the hunter narrative gone rotten. Usually, the anxiety about so radically destroying the very premises of the individualist hero is so intense that the bombing is attributed to the bad guy. And yet, in that shift, the bad guy still ends up as the last real capitalist hero – for unlike the hero/hunter, dependent on the guarantor state, the bad guy often actually fashions the bombs, or at least invests in the stock and personnel to manufacture them.
The narrative elements of the hunter story are in free fall in the action movie. The old dialectical moves turn into gags, and the heroes turn into stunt men accessories to the only thing that is left – the forest of f/x. But in this forest, one never feels the absence of the nymphs, of the spirit who has just departed before you – to use Ortega y Gasset’s thought. The nymphs were never here. The forest of f/x is a wormwood forest – irradiated, sterile, dying.
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The view of the top 20 percent income bracket: the great American twenty first century
An interesting variable in U.S. elections is that the top 20 % does most of the talking - the media, the politicians, the "experts...
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You can skip this boring part ... LI has not been able to keep up with Chabert in her multi-entry assault on Derrida. As in a proper duel, t... -
Ladies and Gentlemen... the moment you have all been waiting for! An adventure beyond your wildest dreams! An adrenaline rush from start to... -
LI feels like a little note on politics is called for. The comments thread following the dialectics of diddling post made me realize that, ...